who live there. As a rule it helps to find a rapport with, and the appreciation of, the audience. And for us it is some kind of musical gift, to honour the host country and its people. For instance in Canada when we sang the National Anthem of Russia people stood up to show respect to our country, and when we finished we sang their country's anthem "O Canada". A million people in our country and abroad like songs like "Kalinka", "Katyusha", "Smuglyanka" and the other songs of the military years as well as "The Day of the Victory", "Dark Eyes", "Vecherny zvon" and "Podmoskovnye vechera". All these songs are known because of the Alexandrov folk song and dance company and people want to hear these songs at every concert. They are not just part of our history; they are great masterpieces. It is interesting that "Svyaschennaya Voyna", written by Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov in 1941, helped Soviet soldiers to protect their Motherland and is still popular in Slovakia, Poland and Bulgaria. Those audiences listen to it standing up and it touches their hearts and souls. For our concerts we search for new musical works because you can't live only in the past. But to tell you the truth it's impossible to imagine our concerts without works of Russian and West-European classical music (Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky), they are part of human history. But our repertoire contains not only songs of the military years and folk songs, arias from operas, songs of the world and spiritual music but also new songs such as Iliya Reznik's "To Serve Russia", and those written by Eduard Hanka, Kim Breytburg, Sergey Sashin and other modern composers and poets. —Director Leonid Ivanovich Malev, 1 December 2008 The Children's Choir School The Alexandrov children's choir school was founded in 2007. Malev said about the school: It's not a secret that the more you work with children, the greater their prospect of achievement in society. We approached the Ministry of Defence with an appeal to organize this choir and it was approved. October 1st 2007 was the opening day of the Aleksandrovcy creative school for musical and aesthetic education for children. This became an important event in the year of the Ensemble's 80th anniversary. The first night of the boys' Aleksandrovcy Choir on December 26th at the Cadets' Gold Epaulette Ball went like clockwork. After that night