After the second ecumenical concert, we had a big party in our first-floor parish hall with all the choir members and directors.  All the participants said they were ready and anxious to do another concert in the future.  I do not know how ready I will be to do it.  It was a big and somewhat expensive project.  Including the video and audio recording costs, the total bill  came to a little over $2,000.  Ticket sales only brought in $900, so I lined up three sponsors who donated the difference.

The entire project has brought us a priceless amount of good will and collegial cooperation in the Protestant community, and lots positive PR in the city and state.  Because of it the Protestants feel much closer to us.  During the two months of rehearsals, one of the participating churches invited us to be part of a weekly radio program produced by a consortium of Protestant churches, which we had not heard about before.  We have to pay for whatever air time we use, but the prices are heavily discounted, so it has presented a great opportunity for us.  We have already done one program about our prolife work and our women's support centers; we will have another program about science and religion, featuring an interview with Fr. Myron and a talk by our resident lay theologian Cyrill Voistel; and later in May we will be responsible for producing another program about the difficulties of the older generation (60's and 70's) to convert to Christianity after living most of their lives trying to conform to good Communist ideology.  It is the hardest age group for us to reach, and one of the most critical, since almost all of them are very close to death.  (The normal life expectancy in Russia is 57 for men and 62 for women.)  So just for this invitation of heavily discounted radio air time prices, it was probably well worth organizing the ecumenical concerts at a $1,300 deficit.

Veronika Kasyanova.

Our parish Easter concerts have also been very well received.  The first one of them (April 20) was videotaped by one of the cable TV stations in Vladivostok.  For the next three days they showed several times a day a 10-minute program about it on their regular feature program, "News of Culture."  It included interviews with me, Marina, and the visiting soprano soloist Veronika Kasyanova.  It provoked more phone calls of people hoping to buy more tickets, but there are no tickets, so, "Oh well."  Our Catholic Concert Choir keeps getting better and better, especially the tenors and basses, who have now caught up with the ladies.  Our new director Tatiana is a highly qualified professional who has not disappointed our hope in her after she took over from our own Svetlana last September.  Tatiana is feeling more at home working with us and is taking more initiative in suggesting repertoire for the future.  For the last two performances (Thursday and Friday evenings), she was given three beautiful big bouquets of flowers  by fans at various times during the concert.  Marina also got several. (It's very Russian to dash up to the stage at the end of a song and offer flowers to the performers during.)  The warmest crowd was the last one on Friday.  They gave several hearty rounds of applause, clapping in time as is the custom in Europe, and at the end they gave two standing ovations and asked for three encores.  After the concert several people were in tears as they came up to me to express their gratitude for organizing the concert.

Vladivostok Catholic Concert Choir directed by Tatiana Lupach. Veronika Kasyanova, soprano from Khabarovsk (front center); Vladivostok Catholic parish chamber orchestra (Regina Angelorum).

Third Vladivostok parish concert (April 23, 2004). Marina at organ with helper Elvira (stop changer, page turner, and parishioner).

Because our new organ is so much more worthy of concert performances than our old organ, we are scheduling more concerts.  The program almost runs itself by now, and I do not have to do too much coordinating.  In May we will have two performances of our traditional concert in honor of the Blessed Mother.  It will be a small cast: just Marina and Veronica, the soprano from Khabarovsk.  Then in June we will have our first-ever concerts from a professional organist of international fame.  He is Marina's teacher from the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, Professor Alexei Parshin.  He will offer three concerts, each one with a different repertoire, on the evenings of June 9, 10, and 11.  He is charging us a bargain rate of only $800 to play all three concerts.  (Usually he gets at least $500 a concert.)  We also have to cover his travel expenses (around $600 round trip from Moscow) and put him up in an inexpensive hotel here in Vladivostok.  Other expenses will be a small percentage of the ticket sales to our concert organizer and to our four daily receptionists who act as ticket sales ladies; our usual posters around the city; and for the first time ever, a few paid TV commercials.  On the other side of the ledger, if we raise the ticket price to 200 rubles ($7.00) and sell out all the tickets (as we always do), we will gross over $5000 to cover our expenses and make a considerable sum of money.  Before he gets here, we hope to be able to obtain a concert license.  All these years, as long as the concerts have been by our parish musical staff (with a few local guest artists to make the programs more interesting), the authorities have not demanded that we have a license, but now that we are finally opening up to nonparish musicians we should get a license, or some day they may throw me in the Gulag.  (Oh well.)  The license will cost around $200, but the down side is that we will have to report our income and pay taxes on it and also report the stipends that we pay the guest artists and pay payroll taxes on them.  It's always something.  Thank God we have a good full-time bookkeeper.

Thanks for your prayers and support for our musical programs!