The Song of the Forests | Singing in Russian, my most recent Musical Experience

Hello friends and music lovers! I hope you are doing well. Today I want to share with you my most recent musical experience. Very inspired to make new music, this choral symphonic work by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich has come to me; an oratorio entitled Песнь о лесах, in English it is known as The Song of the Forests and in my Spanish language simply as La Canción de los Bosques (The Song of the Forests). At the beginning I had a lot of expectation and some reluctance about this staging, as the director wanted to do it in the Russian language, the original and from my own experience I have not had the best Russian pronunciation ever.

But mixing the time of rehearsals between Beethoven and the assembly of the hymn of the soccer federation of my country I was getting passion for this beautiful music. Of course one of our language expert chorister helped us with the international phonetic alphabet, the one that has saved our lives so much to sing in German and French before. With these corrections the study was made very easy and our director was very satisfied with the final result. Even the Niños Cantores de Venezuela accompanied us in a couple of numbers of this work.

This music was written in the late 1940's to celebrate post-World War II reforestation. There is a lot of communist sentiment throughout the piece, which we were told was once acclaimed by Stalin. On this occasion we were conducted by the young Enluis Montes and the musicians who accompanied us were the Juan José Landaeta Symphony Orchestra, another of the professional groups of our institution. Not only did the children singers and the Simón Bolívar National Choir sing, but the Angel Sauce Youth Choir, our younger sister choir, also participated.

I loved the percussion of this work, many moments reminded me of Carmina Burana, and that same effect I think reached the audience who were dying to applaud at the end of each number, although the awareness has been created that these productions should be applauded only at the end. The soloists were Anderson Piaspam, Luis Ramirez and my friend and brother Douglas Romero, all members of our choral group. The presentation took place on Saturday, July 22nd at the Simon Bolivar Hall of the National Center of Social Action for Music. I was feeling a bit lazy, so I didn't take many pictures worth taking that day, however, among the moms who attended the concert I compiled several special moments of the concert for you to enjoy a little of the wonderfulness of this music. I edited this video with Shotcut. Thank you very much for visiting my publication, I send a hug to all of you.