Temecula winery named best in state

For the second year, South Coast Winery has been named the best in the state at the Califgornia State Fair's wine competition in Sacramento. That's rather remarkable considering that it was opened only in2004. More than 600 wineries submitted more than 2,600 wines for the competition. Considering that it was in competition with all those long-established wineries in Norther and Central California, this is quite a tribute.

We watched it being built over the previous year, and one must admit that it is an impressive complex, with a very fine restaurant, villas for overnight stays, and an architecturally interesting walkway along the front. The owners obviously had a lot of capital and did a first-rate job. We have eaten there several times and been impressed each time. When the Temecula Vintage Singers was still in existence and I was singing with them, we sang for some kind of event in the lovely patio area. We didn't visit it last weekend -- went to Ponte Family Vineyards, which is next door and has a slightly more informal atmosphere.

Oh, and the wine is more than a little bit good.

Perhaps Rachmaninov's most "Russian" music

As I write I am listening to Sergei Rachaminov's Vespers, Opus 37, for chorus and soloists. To my ears it is among the most characteristically Russian-sounding of any of Rachmaninov's music with which I am familiar. The fact that it is sacred choral music sung in Russian probably has a good deal to do with it. When I was a teenager I bought an LP of Russian liturgical music -- some composed in the 19th century, some traditional with older roots sung by a Russian choir in Germany, and I just fell in love with it. A proper Russian choir has at least a few impossibly deep-voiced bases able to sing notes lower than I can think of reaching, and they give the ensemble a sense of deep rootedness, as if the music is rising up from the good Russian earth and engulfing you.

The tradition in the Russian Orthodox church is not to have instruments, and perhaps partly as a consequence the harmonies are rather simple -- elemental? -- mostly open fifths and fourths. Rachmaninov's Vespers has much the same feel as the traditional Russian liturgical music, which was what I think he was going for. Op. 37 would be early in his career. His later music, undoubtedly influenced by western European music but unmistakably his, sounds (to me) more "romantic" than as distinctively Russian as this piece.

The Temecula Vintage Singers performed the Vespers the year before I joined (David Harmon, one of those impossibly deep basses, who later became a good friend, helped fill out the sound) so I have never sung this music. I am sure I would enjoy it, however.

Rachmaninov at his most characteristically Russian

As I write I'm listening to a nice recording of Rachamninov's Vespers, Op. 37, done by the Academy of Choral Art in Moscow with Victor Popov conducting. For my money, it's his most characteristically Russian-sounding music. Of course my idea of what is characteristically Russian was influenced early -- I was probably 17 when I got the record -- by an album of Russian liturgical music, sung, I believe, by a Russian exile choir in Germany. I fell in love with that music, with its impossibly low basses helping to create the impression that the music was growing right out of the ground -- the Russian soil -- and enveloping you in sanctity of a very earthy, perhaps primitive kind (gosh, it's hard to describe music in mere words!). I loved Tchaikovsky early too, but in retrospect I think he was more in tune with western European influences than composers like Moussorgsky, Glinka, Borodin, even Ippolitov-Ivanov, who sounded more "really Russian" to me. I see Prokofiev as very Russian too, but in a different more modern way.

Rachmaninov loved that music too, and the Vespers is a conscious attempt to put its spirit in a slightly more formal, perhaps arty form. His better-known music -- the piano concertos mainly but also the symphonies -- seem a bit more elaborately classical and a bit westernized, which may have turned out to be his true voice.

The Temecula Vintage Singers did the piece the year before I joined them, so I've never had a chance to sing it. It sounds as if it would be fun -- challenging, but fun.