Leningrad Boys’ Choir to sing Tuesday at Bangor

The Leningrad Boys’ Choir will continue the Maine portion of their American tour Monday and Tuesday with performances at Bar Harbor and Bangor. Monday’s performance at Mount Desert High School will be a highlight of the 1990 Arcady Summer Music Festival at Bar Harbor. They will appear Tuesday at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Bangor.

A final Maine appearance is scheduled for Wednesday at the Dover-Foxcroft Congregational Church. Concert time is 8 p.m. for all appearances.

Planning for the visit to Maine began last winter when pianist Masanobu Ikemiya, Arcady’s artistic director, played a concert tour which included Leningrad and Siberian cities in the U.S.S.R. Impressed with the young musicians when he visited Leningrad’s M.I. Glinka Capella, or Choir College, he urged Arcady, on his return to the United States, to book the Boys’ Choir.

The choir dates back to the Academic Choir, founded by Czar Ivan III in 1479. In the 19th century, the Choir College, eventually named after Glinka, included him as well as other celebrated Russian composers, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Arensky and Ljadov, on its faculty. Before and since that time it produced an impressive succession of Russian composers, conductors and concert and opera artists.

In 1858 instrumental classes were added to the vocal curriculum, and conducting also is taught at the Glinka School.

The boys get the normal secondary school education along with their music. The courses are free of charge, but qualifying for the school demands high musical standards in the young applicants. Most of the singers are between 10 and 17 years old. They will travel with their school director, Sergei Dzevanovsky; their conductor, Vladimir Stolpovsky, and their translator-teacher, Svetlana Ibatulina.

Soviet sponsors of the Leningrad Boys’ Choir visit to America are the Russian Video Co., which is providing the round-trip air travel on Aeroflot from Leningrad to Washington, D.C.

The group will fly from Bangor to Philadelphia for a concert there on Thursday, July 27, and they’ll perform at an International Festival in Bridgeport, Conn., on Sunday, July 29. There is a possibility that they’ll sing at the United Nations in New York City before flying back to Leningrad.

The choirboys will be led by their conductor, Vladimir Stolpovsky, in their Maine performances, with students Dimitri Sokolov and Ilya Pavlenko at the pianos as accompanists and soloists. Their program will include sacred concertos, possibly a liturgy by Grethaninoff, a Haydn Mass, songs by Tchaikovsky and other composers, spirituals, excerpts from Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” Russian and Georgian folk songs, and music composed by the Beatles.

Intermission art exhibitions will show work by Marianne Hancock and Dee Karnofsky on Mount Desert Island; at Dover-Foxcroft the artists will be Beth Caule, Nancy Jackman and Rusty Sharick.

The Arcady Music Society is sponsored in part by the Maine Arts Commission, an agency supported by public tax dollars.

Tickets are on sale at Ampersand in Orono; Foxcroft B and B in Dover-Foxcroft; Libby’s Card Shop, Bangor; Mr. Paperback, Bar Harbor; Oz Bookstore, Southwest Harbor; Shanty Gift Shop, Dover-Foxcroft; and Sherman’s Book Store, Bar Harbor.