Dmitry Smirnov was
pushing fifty when he wrote Our Lady’s
Rejoicing in Sorrow and is not to
be confused with his better known and
similarly named near contemporary Dmitri
Smirnov, who was born in 1948 and who
now lives in England. Smirnov was born
in Leningrad in 1952 and now teaches
at the St Petersburg Conservatoire being
active as a composer and conductor.
He’s written for a wide range of forces
– choral often, but also instrumental
and film music – as well as a 1985-87
opera called Jerma. But it seems
that liturgical music, and a strong
spiritual spine, has informed much that
he’s written and has continued to write.
Our Lady is
a seven movement sacred work – "Choral
frescoes" – for female voice, soprano
saxophone and a mixed choir. It’s powerfully
rooted in Russian liturgical music and
yet one feel other obvious crosscurrents
that attest to its composer’s awareness
of other less obviously traditional
musics. The soprano saxophonist, the
fine Andrey Bolshiyanov, spends some
time shadowing the big voiced mezzo,
Lyudmila Shkirtil, adding a plaintive,
plangent "other" to her line
but in the fourth "mosaic"
we find a more urgent sense of onrush
and subsequent relaxation. Here Smirnov
vests the music with a sense of Renaissance
grandeur and spaciousness; warm harmonies
underlie his writing, as does a see-sawing
between the beneficent and the more
dramatic material. In the final movement,
the Glorification, we hear the soprano
saxophone join the choral texture rather
than merely shadowing or commenting
upon it, and becomes fused with it.
It soars, taking a contemplative and
rapturously simple line to the quiet
conclusion. An influence on this writing,
one suspects, is Jan Garbarek with whose
work with the Hilliard Ensemble this
one bears some kinship (and not just
Officium).
To set Smirnov’s work
in some kind of aural and liturgical
context it’s prefaced by five selections
from the Medieval Russian canon. These
range from the purely melodic Greek
chant, through the warm, slow, deep
sonorities of the Znamenny chant to
the tension filled pedal note that drones
through the Byzantine chant (excellent
high tenors by the way). We can also
admire the defiant contrast between
the florid female voicings in the concerto
for 16 voice mixed choir and the restrained
and more sanguine answering male ones.
Fortunately we have
texts in Cyrillic and in English translation
and can go some way toward perceiving
Smirnov’s musical imperatives in his
liturgical works. The choir and soloists
are very proficient. If you can track
it down you will find an essentially
traditionally minded composer whose
ear for colour and flourish adds palpable
depth to his settings.
Jonathan Woolf
Lyudmila Shkirtil (mezzo) 
