Don Cossack Choir conducted by Serge Jaroff: "God, Hear My Prayer" / "Requiem"

Almost exactly 100 years ago the Bolshevik party passed a secret resolution to wipe out the Cossacks, which is a popular activity you're familiar with that humans like to do from time to time. By 1921 the Cossacks were well and truly decimated and their survivors spread to the four winds, and in a Turkish internment camp a lieutenant named Serge Jaroff formed some of his fellow soldiers into a chorus with himself as conductor, to entertain the locals and to keep from going buggo. When the troops were shipped to Bulgaria, the Russian envoy suggested that this band of Cossacks from the Don River region become the choir for the local church. Tenacity and some lucky breaks kept them together as a performing group, and by 1923 they were established as a popular act in Vienna. They made their first recordings for Germany’s Artiphon label in 1925, and the following year started recording for Columbia in Europe. They first toured the USA in 1930 and became U.S. citizens en masse in 1936.

Their continued popularity throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in the West certainly had a lot to do with their status as exotic survivors of a faraway land who didn’t reek of Communism – it would be hard to find any touring act LESS enamored of the Red Army – but in performance this group impressed with their sheer musical muscle. The well-trained ear will notice the tonic shift as much as a quarter-tone between the beginning and end of some of these songs, but really, when you’re hearing basso profundos not only hitting notes too low for more than a dozen living humans to sing but SCOOPING UP into them, thoughts of perfect pitch are going to fall by the wayside and you may begin relating to them as a sheer force of nature. My dad saw them perform when he was at Babson College circa 1949 and he describes it as the most electrifying show he ever witnessed.

The Don Cossack Chorus / Don Cossack Choir discography under the direction of Serge Jaroff really is very large – they were active over six decades on labels including Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, and Decca, and made recordings from the pre-electric era straight through nearly to the dawn of disco – so I’m going to focus just on their Columbia Masterworks releases, specifically their multi-record albums and long-players released between 1943-1951. First, though, here are two early platters of religious music. The first is Columbia Masterworks 7352-M, God, Hear My Prayer (composed by Alexander Arkhangelsky) and Requiem (composed by Grigor Lvovsky). My research suggests this was recorded in 1929.

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