The devastating loss of 64 choristers, orchestra members and dancers from the Alexandrov Ensemble as well as 9 journalists in a tragic plane crash over the Black Sea reverberates its shock back to my early years. The first time I heard the Internationale, it was sung by the Red Army Choir, the precursor of the Alexandrov Ensemble, on a record of my dad’s. Being a bass singer and chorister himself, my father found the rich timbre and brilliance of the Red Army Choir irresistible.
As a confirmed voter for the Australian Labor Party whom Lenin had described accurately and disparagingly in 1913 as “a liberal-bourgeois party”, my father would not have appreciated perhaps the sentiments expressed in the USSR official anthem, though he loved the passionate Slavic feel of the music. Few things would bring a tear to his stolid Scottish eye, yet this rendition was one.
Somewhere packed away, this record still survives, along with those he brought back from South Africa during the apartheid years, like “Wait a Minim!”
Here’s the Red Army Choir in 1993 with the Leningrad Cowboys in Helsinki performing Rolling Stones and many other covers.
And more recently, the Alexandrov Ensemble performed a “heppy” version of “Happy”!
Predictably, bloodthirsty apologists for AQ/Nusra/JFS and affiliates (who in concert with depraved patriarchal oppression of women regard music as “wicked and immoral“) and other obfuscators of US/GCC/NATO contras’ belligerence gloat at the deaths of Russia’s iconic musos.
The enemies of music are enemies of their own humanity.
