Steinberg Maximillian: Passion Week

Passion Week is a long-lost choral masterpiece composed by Rimsky-Korsakov’s favourite student, heir apparent and son-in-law, 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 All-Night Vigil the colourful 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.