Russian resonance

MALCOLM MILLER attends the first of a
new series of Music at the Wallace Collection

Four resonant Russian male voices transformed the large gallery of London's Wallace Collection into the great hall of Konevets Monastery, near St Petersburg, and into Russia's Imperial Tsarist Palace, in a beguiling and entertaining programme of sacred and secular settings on 17 November 2002.

The occasion was the London début of the Konevets Vocal Quartet from St Petersburg, the climax of a UK tour involving over forty concerts, and the first of four concerts in the current, eighth, series of 'Music at the Wallace Collection'. This is a highly successful international début recital series now in its fifth year, presented by Springboard Concerts Trust, helping to introduce leading young artists from around the world to the British concert public.

The Konevets are certainly unique, a strikingly authentic a capella group, founded in 1992 by their bass Igor Dmitriev, also a composer, with four singers who all studied at the St Petersburg Municipal Choir School. In their first decade, alongside a busy international concert schedule, they have been involved in supporting restoration of the nearby six-hundred-year-old Konevets Monastery from which they take their name, evolving a varied repertoire reflecting the breadth of sacred and secular Russian music, featured in a seven CD series completed only in July 2002.

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