The Sretensky Monastery Choir performed on Sakhalin with the program “Dedicated to the Great Victory”

At the end of last week, thanks to the Rosneft company, residents of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk attended a unique concert dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

On the map of Russia, the regional capital became the easternmost city where the Sretensky Monastery Choir (Moscow) shared with listeners its imperishable song heritage on the theme of the war years.

It is noteworthy that the right to open the concert program on the stage of the congress hall of the TDC "Stolitsa" was delegated by the famous group to young employees of JSC "Sakhalinmorneftegaz-Shelf" Kristina Zhuravlevich and Anton Babanov. Winners of the corporate festival "Energy of Talents", they performed the song "Scarlet Sunsets", which was a great honor and reward for them.

And then the concert performance began in two parts. Its leitmotif was the thought: "There is no family in Russia where its hero is not remembered..." And the choir of the Sretensky Monastery conveyed it to the listeners, turning in their unique and multi-genre project not only to musical masterpieces, but also to high poetry, confessional stories about the extraordinary fates of front-line soldiers.

As it turned out, there was an element of intriguing surprise in this plan. If at the beginning of the concert the stories about the heroes were perceived by the audience as a universal tribute to the memory of courageous compatriots, then by the end of the program it became clear: the choir members told the war stories of their families from the screen. They shared joys and sorrows and seemed to lead the listeners along the incredibly difficult roads of war to home, to the Victory salutes. They told about how many obstacles and unbearable losses the soldiers had to overcome! And for many, this path never led to their native threshold. The faces of the heroes looked into the audience from photographs of the distant 1940s.

- When we talk about our relatives, it is a difficult moment for us, - said the soloist of the choir Alexander Borodeiko. - We pass everything through ourselves, share the innermost with the audience and with each other. We get to know ourselves better despite the fact that we have been working together for many years. We think that the audience will not remain indifferent.

And so it happened. The audience responded with applause to each piece, because the choir organically wove into the stories about the front-line soldiers the recitatively "read" song "The Sacred War" and such imperishable, eternal pieces as "Roads", "Farewell of Slavyanka", "In the Dugout", "Katyusha", "Dark Night", "Smuglyanka"... The concert program also included compositions of a later time, which also became real masterpieces: "Song-Tale of Mamayev Kurgan", "The Last Battle", "Missing in Action", "We Need One Victory", "Oriole", "Victory Day"... The video sequence, sound and light special effects added emotionality and poignancy to the performances.

The Sretensky Monastery Choir (artistic director Andrey Poltorukhin, director composer Fyodor Stepanov) delighted the audience with the highest vocal mastery. Perhaps it can be defined as exemplary. The soloists also deserved ovations with cries of "Bravo!": Vasily Startsev, Mikhail Miller, Alexander Prepelitsa, Mikhail Turkin, Vadim Zaripov, Ivan Leonov, Alexander Borodeyko, Sergey Sevastyanov.

It is especially worth noting that PAO NK Rosneft has been directly involved in the success of the famous group for ten years now. It is also the general sponsor of the concert program dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory.

- Only thanks to Rosneft we have the technical capabilities to take all the equipment and give concerts at a high level, with a video sequence, - said Alexander Borodeyko. - All this obliges us to perform the works in such a way as to maximally reveal the musical images. Our team is a family where brotherhood and spiritual unity are honored. The uniqueness of the choir is that there are no people indifferent to their work. This is the most valuable thing.

Opening the concert, the artists asked themselves questions: between us and the first peaceful dawn there are 80 years, a huge thickness of time. Why is the Great Victory Day not getting further from us? Why does this holiday remain piercingly eternal? The answers to these questions were the entire three-hour concert program. And the words: “Two torches – love and gratitude burn on Earth on this day. And this light will not go out.”

The event ended with a kind of martyrology with photographs of the singers’ heroic relatives.

The memory of them, as of all front-line soldiers, is alive. Their feat is immortal.

Lyudmila Stepanets.