Being drawn to intensely Russian sources and the search for an original Russian musical path are typical of the music of Alexander Kastalsky.
In 1886 he entered service at the Moscow Synodal School of Church Song. This school trained boy singers for the Synodal Choir which was then the oldest Russian choir, tracing its roots back to patriarchal vocalist scribes. For many centuries the choir sang at the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Moscow Kremlin. Kastalsky entered the Synodal School and the Synodal Choir just as they were about to be reformed. The acclaimed researcher Stepan Vasilievich Smolensky was invited to Moscow from Kazan to oversee the reforms.
The results of Smolensky’s work surpassed all expectations. He created an atmosphere of tremendous piety for church song traditions that gave rise to a composers’ movement the members of which were teachers and researchers from the Synodal School. Among them was Alexander Dmitrievich Kastalsky – at the time a forty-year-old piano teacher and precentor of the Synodal Choir.
Fraternal Commemoration was Alexander Kastalsky’s largest work. It was written at the start of World War I and is the only musical memorial in the world that is dedicated to its victims. The composer envisaged the work as a prayer to be sung over his fellow men’s graves.
In addition to Fraternal Commemoration, Alexander Kastalsky also composed the opera Klara Milich after the novella by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, the children’s opera The Grey Wolf and Ivan Tsarevich, the cantata A Poem about Russian Church Canticles, eight works for piano set to Georgian folk themes and the cycle From Past Centuries (Experience of Musical Restorations) among other works. |
