Volume 4 - Ephrem Podgaits: Secular Choruses for Treble Voices

This album contains a selection of primarily secular settings on texts by various poets, ranging from John Keats to Alexander Pushkin. (The one exception is a beautiful setting of the Latin hymn “Ave Maria.”) Ephrem Podgaits’s (b. 1949) music has a very modern, contemporary sound and it is technically complex. In performing it, the Vesna Children’s Choir rises to the challenge and displays an excellence that is downright virtuoso in quality. To the listener, Podgats’s music can also be challenging at first hearing; yet it is eminently listenable--vibrant, exciting, alternately dramatic and lyrically beautiful--showing the composer to be a significant contributor to modern secular part-song literature in Russia and particularly, to repertoire for children’s chorus.