Yesterday, I listened to a lot of music from the British folk-prog group Renaissance. The group had a rabidly fanatic cult following on the East Coast back in the 1970s, and Renaissance recorded a classic live album from their performances (3 nights) at Carnegie Hall. The group featured an amazing singer, Annie Haslam, who has an unequaled talent for bringing out the emotion of a lyric. One of their signature tracks is "Mother Russia", which is loosely based on the career of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. So.....picture yourself as an idealistic young man or woman in the 1970s and early 1980s living in NYC or maybe even a cosmopolitan section of St. Louis that was in those days known as a haven for resettled Russian Jews. You like classical music, but you're wild for this new thing happening....this progressive-rock sound. Then....you hear this band, Renaissance, and this song, "Mother Russia". There's this Romantic orchestral arrangement that segues into an acoustic guitar-driven song with plaintive lyrics:
Red blood, white snow;
He knows frozen rivers won't flow.
So cold, so true;
Mother Russia, he cries for you.
Amazingly moving. The crowd at Carnegie Hall went insane with rapture. It still chokes up that idealistic young man from St. Louis.
(I should have posted this over in BFK's Music Corner. Honestly, I didn't intend to get this deep....)
