RACS - Russian American Colony Singers
Address:
P. O. Box 770787, Eagle River, Alaska 99577, U.S.A.
 All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2000-2010.

Conductor -
Pavel Sharomov,
Honored Artist of Russia

RACS Art Director -Zlata Lund

RACS President -Meg Girard

Русский Хор на Аляске

Pushkin and Russian Music

No poet is more revered in Russia than Alexander Pushkin. His biography reads like a romantic novel: an ancestry that included both Russian aristocracy and an Abyssinian Prince; numerous amorous adventures (he was in love 104 times according to his own admission); constant quarrels with the authorities, membership in secret societies; exile to the distant parts of the empire; death on a duel to defend his wife's honor.

He transfigured the Russian literature like no other writer either before or since. Pushkin's verse is elegant and, yet, deceptively simple. The absolute perfection of its structure seems to invite a musical setting. Pushkin's stamp upon the Russian music is tremendous: his poetry has inspired hundreds of songs by composers ranging from his own contemporaries to Benjamin Britten. A very incomplete list of operas inspired by him includes Ruslan and Lyudmila, Boris Godunov, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, Mazepa, Aleko, The Golden Cockerel. It is fair to say that both Russian opera and art song are unimaginable without Pushkin.

The recent concert in Anchorage in February 2010 presents a general overview of Pushkin's poetry set to music by some of the greatest Russian composers including Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Sviridov, Rachmaninoff and others.

Mr. Lowenfeld will tell the story about Alexander Pushkin, (1799-1837) Russia's most beloved poet and writer, whose works can be described as the fountainhead of all Russian literature. Westerners are somewhat familiar with those works by Pushkin which were set to music by Tchaikovsky - the verse novel Eugene Onegin, and the brilliant short story The Queen of Spades. Lowenfeld's book My Talisman, (The Lyric Poetry of Alexander Pushkin) is the only bilingual edition of Pushkin's poetry in existence.

The book signing will be available. This book will be available for purchase.

ALSO: A sponsors' dinner with Julian Lowenfeld will be held on Saturday, March 27th. For reservations and information please call Zlata Lund 907-230-0280 or email zlata@acsalaska.net. 
 
Introducing Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is universally revered by Russians as their most beloved and greatest literary genius. In critic Apollon Grigoriev's famous phrase, "Pushkin is our all" -- the very lodestar of the Russian culture, the creator of the Russian literary language. Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Nabokov, (the Russian literary geniuses best known in the West) all utterly revered Pushkin and acknowledged themselves Pushkin's heirs and literary debtors.

To grasp Pushkin one must hear his musicality. His genius in its sublimity is frequently and properly compared to Mozart's: miraculous, prodigious feats of creativity, wrought with seemingly effortless, seamless grace, evocative power, warmth, wit, passion, sheer musicality, inventive rhythmic swing, and rhyming playfulness - and all imbued with a certain divine purity, a wisdom born of innocence, a childlike, direct, sweet, natural, vigorous, limpid, language - often, alas, all the more mysteriously difficult to translate for its simplicity and clarity.

Introducing Lowenfeld

Julian Lowenfeld was blessed as a child to have great poetry read aloud to him. Reverence for Russian literature runs deep in his family: his great-grandfather, Raphael Löwenfeld, was the Russian correspondent for the newspaper Berliner Tagesblatt, the first translator of Leo Tolstoy's works into German, and the author of a literary interview-biography of Tolstoy called Gespr che ber und mit Tolstoj. He also founded Berlin's celebrated Schiller Theater. Löwenfeld's great-grandson Julian began studying Russian literature at Harvard University about 100 years later, and continued as an exchange student at Leningrad State University, before graduating from New York University School of Law and becoming a practicing trial lawyer in New York City, specializing in copyright law and immigration. Later he continued studying Russian literature independently with the renowned Pushkin scholar Nadyezhda Braginskaya.

Other Locations

This presentation will also take place:

- In Homer on Monday March 22nd at the Homer Library at 6:30 PM.

For question please email Yulia Kern: flower_y7@yahoo.com 

- In Fairbanks on Monday, March 29th at 5 PM at the UAF Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

For questions please email Alla Grikurova: agrikurova@alaska.edu

Friday, March 26th at 7 p.m.
Anchorage Museum of History and Art.

Pushkin for Americans!

(Suggested Donation
$10 at the door)

This is something for those who don't know poetry. This is something for those who don't like or love poetry. This is for Pushkin lovers and the uninitiated alike. This is something for everyone.

There also will be an exposition of children's drawings on Pushkin's fairy tales.

The Russian American Colony Singers invite you to Anchorage Museum of History and Art to hear the presentation of Julian Henry Lowenfeld , the author of the book "My Talisman".

Come One! Come All!
Invite your friends!