The musical world is acquainted with the name of Vasily Kalinnikov (1866–1901), whose untimely death cut short a promising career as a symphonic composer. The name of his younger brother Victor Kalinnikov (1870–1927) remains virtually unknown in Russia, and even more so in the West. Yet this eminent choral conductor and pedagogue, affiliated with the Moscow Synodal School of Church Singing and the Moscow Conservatory, left a small but significant legacy of choral works—twenty-four sacred choruses and a number of secular choral part-songs and folk-song arrangements—which show him to be an accomplished master. His setting of the ancient Christian Hymn Radiant Light employs a rich and varied palette of choral sonorities by means of which he underscores the textual structure of the hymn and expresses the theological majesty of the text.

from notes by Vladimir Morosan © 1997