Howlin' Wolf - "Message To The Young" / This was the 8th album by blues master Howlin' Wolf released by Chess Records in 1971. Often considered an attempt at offering the masses a psychedelic record, it's sound ranges from acid-rock, to blues, to funk, and back again. The title song is Wolf's attempt at reaching the youth of the era in a beautiful spoken word ballad which can easily be summed up in two words: Be Yourself. Arranged and conducted by Cash McCall, this album presents Wolf in the company of legendary pianist Sonny Thompson.
This is a repertoire that's been surprisingly well represented on disc, benefiting from the glasnost/perestroika-inspired revival of liturgical music in Russia in the early 1980s and the coincidental CD-fueled resurgence of the classical recording industry. One of the beauties of the unique, harmonized chant forms that characterize Russian church music is the attention this music received from some of the country's finest composers, some of them well known--Grechaninov, Bortnyansky, Glazunov, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov--and others more obscure but nevertheless highly skilled. Most of the composers represented here are among the latter category, but the music is first rate and the choir, from Moscow's historic Novospassky Monastery, is equal to the best on disc. It's also a plus that most of the selections, by Lvov, Arkhangelsky, Smolensky, Kastalsky, and others, aren't duplicated elsewhere. The program follows a service of the Divine Liturgy, which includes hymns, antiphons, the Great Litany, the Trisagion, Nicene Creed, a psalm, and the Doxology. I was pleasantly surprised by the exceptional quality of the singing, set in shimmering, vibrant sound made in a Moscow studio but with the kind of (artificial?) resonance that could just as well have come from the wood and stone environs of an ancient church. There are many excellent choices for recordings of Russian religious music, but if you want to hear what the real thing sounds like, you won't go wrong with this--and its budget price makes it especially attractive. --David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com
During the past century Russian Orthodox vocal music has experienced two periods of rebirth. The first, which began in the last years of the 19th century, consisted of a return to the popular sources of religious chant in the znamenny chant tradition passed down from its origins in ancient Byzantine chant and maintained by churches and choirs across Russia until the 17th century, when rulers such as Catherine the Great began to look westwards for cultural identity. Composers such as Kastalsky, Chesnokov and Grechaninov repudiated the Italian and French influences which had shaped the work of Classical and Romantic-era composers such as the Sacred Concertos of Bortniansky. repudiated the Italian and French influences which had shaped the work of Classical and Romantic-era composers such as the Sacred Concertos of Bortniansky. This renaissance was foreshadowed by Tchaikovsky’s setting of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in 1878 – in its time a controversial work, rejected by the Church – and reached its zenith with the two sacred cycles by Rachmaninoff: another setting of the Liturgy and then his religious masterpiece, the Vespers (All Night Vigil) of 1915. Once more suppressed by the 1917 Revolution, an authentic strain of Russian sacred music had to wait until the era of glasnost in the late 1980s and early 90s Rybin Male Choir could once more be formed to sing and record the repertoire that is their country’s musical inheritance, and most of these recordings date from the early 90s, first released on the ‘Saison Russe’ imprint for its renewal. Ensembles such as the of the Chant du Monde label, long unavailable and now reissued here for the first time.
