Lentils and The Red Russian Army Choir

We had my parents over for dinner last night.

I had been planning on experimenting with a lentil meal for a couple of days now, as someone from a music forum recommended me a recipe on how to cook them with sausages and vegetables. The goal of the meal was using sausages as a decoy to have my boyfriend eat lentils, but I used a kind that were too spicy for his tastes, so that didn't work at all (guess who froze the leftovers and will be eating them for lunch for a week?).

So I cooked (in this case, overcooked) the lentils with bay leaves, pepper, garlic, half an onion, a carrot and a celery branch, and I must say they tasted delicious just like that. But then, the next step was sauteing them with veggies, sliced sausages and adding a can of tomatoes at the end. Very nice, but next time, using orange lentils might make the whole meal look better.

At least, the sausage plan worked on my dad. We never had lentils at my parents' either when we were kids, as my dad is quite the conservative Norseman when it comes to food (and everything else), but he seemed to have liked the meal.

I even managed to discuss music with my parents, which is a rare occurrence, and had them listen to Le Orme because they thought "rock progressivo italiano" was bound to be something really weird, and really loud.

And in the middle of my boyfriend mocking my tastes for bass and baritone voices in singers, I put on some Tindersticks, and turns out my mother also thinks Staples has lovely vocals. And, much to my surprise, she went on an admiration filled rant about The Red Russian Army Choir's baritones vocalists.

Oh my god, I am not a freak, I just take after my mother (as I have informed my boyfriend, who insists he was already aware I eerily took after her).

Anyway, so I've been looking into this Choir, and turns out that they are not the Red Russian Army Choir, they are in fact "Дважды краснознаменный академический ансамбль песни и пляски Российской армии имени А. В. Александрова, Dvazhdy krasnoznamenny akademichesky ansambl' pesni i plyaski Rossiyskoy armii imeni A. V. Alexandrova" or the "A. V. Alexandrov Russian army twice red-bannered academic song and dance ensemble".

Now, isn't that catchy?

So apparently, the choir formed within the Soviet army in the late 1920s, with the idea of promoting amateur singing and good music, as well an entertaining the troops. Alexandr Alexandrov was the original master and conductor, and his song Boris succeeded him, right until 1987, taking the choir around the world on tours. The current director is Vyacheslav Korobko.

They are good, and I can see why my mother likes them so much, especially considering that this is an ensemble that managed to survive the end of the Soviet Union and still be a success now. They apparently have this huge repertoire of Russian folk, opera, hymns and the likes. Everybody seems to want to work with them too, from David Foster to local sensation Marie-Michèle Desrosiers.

And now I'm stuck with Kalinka in my head.