The Frescoes of Dionysius

The Frescoes of Dionysius dates from 1981 and is scored for nine instruments — a chamber ensemble rather than an orchestra. Shchedrin took his subject from the wall paintings that the icon painter Dionisy and his sons made in 1502 in the Nativity Cathedral of the Ferapontov Monastery, north of Vologda, the only cycle by that master to survive largely intact. The music does not narrate; it works with the pale, thinned-out colours of the frescoes themselves, using sustained lines and bare intervals in a manner close to Russian sacred chant, which Soviet publishing conditions of the period made an awkward reference.