Maximilian Steinberg: Passion Week

Passion Week is a long-lost choral masterpiece composed by Rimsky Korsakov's favorite student, heir apparent and son-inlaw, Maximilian Steinberg. A product of his interest in the sacred and mystical, it is a tour de force of the systematic use of medieval Church Slavonic chant melodies and shares with Rachmaninov's AllNight Vigil the colorful use of choral textures. Steinberg's settings are complex and rich, with a diverse and sometimes daring harmonic palette, offering eleven movements of distinctive and expressive content that reveal an artist's search for identity at a time of increasing hostility to religion.