Founded in 2006, The Clarion Choir has performed on some of the great stages of North America and Europe. The group specialises in Early Music and Slavonic repertoire, often performing with the period-instrument Clarion Orchestra and artistic director Steven Fox. The group is based and performs regularly in New York, in such venues as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.

The ensemble’s recordings include Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week (8.573665) and Kastalsky’s Memory Eternal to the Fallen Heroes (8.573889). The group was featured on PBS in 2014 for its performance of Steinberg’s Passion Week, and in 2016 gave the Russian premiere of the same work in St Petersburg and Moscow. The Clarion Choir and Steven Fox have performed with Madonna at the Met Gala, Susan Graham, Leonard Slatkin, Harry Bicket and The English Concert.

For more information, visit www.clarionsociety.org.

Photo: Isabel Provost

Steven Fox is artistic director of The Clarion Choir and The Clarion Orchestra in New York, and music director of the Cathedral Choral Society at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.

He is the founder of Musica Antiqua St Petersburg, which he established as Russia’s first period-instrument orchestra at the age of 21. From 2008 to 2013 he served as an associate conductor at New York City Opera, and since then has appeared as a guest conductor with many leading orchestras and opera companies both in the United States and abroad. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and of the Royal Academy of Music, where he was also named an Associate (ARAM).

Kastalsky was a seminal figure upon the national musical landscape of Russia in the first two decades of the 20th century. A student of Tchaikovsky and Taneyev, he was appointed to the faculty of the Moscow Synodal School of Church Singing in 1887 and remained affiliated with that institution until it was closed in 1918 by the Bolsheviks. As a composer, conductor, folklorist, and administrator, by nature inquisitive and innovative, he moved freely among the spheres of church, classical, and folk music in a way very much his own. In his time, he was acclaimed as the founder of a new, truly national Russian style of church music, in which melodies and individual chant formulas of Znamenny—the earliest notated chant known among the Eastern Slavs—and other ecclesiastical chants are combined with techniques of counter-voice polyphony drawn from the Russian choral folk song. The skilful use of these peculiarly Russian elements give Kastalsky’s works a marked national flavour, while the use of church melodies links them to centuries-old traditions of the Eastern Orthodox liturgical aesthetic. His compositional techniques were emulated and developed by a host of composers, including Pavel and Alexander Chesnokov, Alexander Grechaninov, Viktor Kalinnikov, Alexander Nikolsky, Konstantin Shvedov, Nikolai Tcherepnin, and Sergey Rachmaninov: the latter would send pages of his manuscripts to Kastalsky for comment and approval.

Kastalsky’s compositional output was largely limited to miniature forms—sacred choruses, some 175 of them, and choral folk song arrangements.