The Day The Massed Choral Music Died
By Mitch Berg
Say what you will about Russia and its history: not good for the proverbial little guy, lots of death and misery, in a demographic death spiral…
…but if they do something well, it’s massed choral music.
And so I pay my regards to the Alexandrow Ensemble – known to generations as the Red Army Choir, during the Soviet era – whose military plane crashed in the Black Sea en route to entertain the troops in Syria.
As the big choirs go, they were bigger than most:
And the land of Tolstoy, Solzhenitzyn and Dostoyevskii writes even does jingo as an epic production:
RIP, Alexandrow Ensemble.
December 28th, 2016 at 12:42 pm
Preliminary results from the plane’s black box suggests the flaps weren’t extended. That’s in pilot 101. Hard to imagine an experienced crew making that kind of blunder.
January 1st, 2017 at 5:47 pm
There is absolutely nothing in this world like a Russian baseline… somber news indeed and likely to be expressed in song.
January 1st, 2017 at 5:48 pm
BASS line.. stupid autocorrect
January 3rd, 2017 at 10:06 am
Hard to imagine an experienced crew making that kind of blunder.
Not so if you consider the likelihood that experienced crew was likely drunk out of their skulls.