In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Collected Sacred Choral Works, and: Oche Nahs = Our Father, no. 12 from Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and: A Wondrous Birth = Stránnoye Rozhdestvó vídevshe, no. 7 from A Wondrous Birth
  • Gregory Myers
Alexandre Gretchaninoff. Collected Sacred Choral Works. Introductory articles by Vladimir Morosan and Marina Rakhmanova. (Monuments of Russian Sacred Music, ser. VII, vol. 2.) San Diego, CA: Musica Russica, 2009. [Portrait & facsimile, 2 p.; From the Editor, in Eng., Rus., p. xv; The Sacred Choral Legacy of Alexandre Gretchaninoff, in Eng., Rus., p. xvii–xlv; score, p. 3–373; crit. notes, p. 377–88; The Russica™ Transliteration System, p. 389–90. ISBN 978-0-9701767-2-1. $95.]
Constantine Shvedov. Otche Nahs = Our Father. No. 12 from Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, op. 16. San Diego, CA: Musica Russica, 2011. [Editor’s notes, p. 2; score, p. 3–7. Pub. no. Sh 027. $1.85.]
Georgy Sviridov. A Wondrous Birth = Stránnoye Rozhdestvó vídevshe. No. 7 from A Wondrous Birth. (Choral Music of Russia.) San Diego, CA: Musica Russica, 2011. [English text, p. 2; score, p. 3–19; notes, p. 20. Pub. no. CMR 010-7. $2.90.]

Since its inception in the 1980s, the firm of Musica Russica, with its musically very talented founding editor-in-chief Dr. Vladimir Morosan, has been dedicated to publishing and distributing Russian sacred choral music. The result has been the issue of an invaluable series of anthologies that has included the complete sacred works of [End Page 883] Tchaikovsky (ser. II, vols. 1/2/3), Rimsky-Korsakov (ser. III), Viktor Kalinnikov (ser. VIII), and Rachmaninoff (ser. IX, vols. 1/2), with an important additional volume given over to an early figure in Russian church music composition, Vasily Titov and the Russian baroque (ser. XIII, Historical Editions, vol. 1). Each volume is a balanced amalgam of musical score and sound scholarship. The collected sacred choral compositions of the very long-lived Rimsky-Korsakov student, Alexandre Gretchaninoff (1864–1956), comprise ser. VII, vol. 2.

No expense has been spared in the production of this deluxe volume, which has been crafted of the finest materials available in the publishing industry: hard-covered, hand-sewn, with gold-embossed titling in both Russian and English, with carefully set music printed on the finest heavy-grade paper. Accessible to both scholar and performer alike, each volume in the series—and this one is no exception—has been provided with a thoroughly researched scholarly introduction and copious notes in both Russian and English that serve to place the composer in his historical context and provide details of his musical evolution. The musical scores that follow are painstakingly set and provided with Russian/ Church Slavonic texts and Roman transliteration underlay, with English translations provided.

For the Gretchaninoff volume, the Russian-language notes have been coauthored by editor Morosan in collaboration with the eminent Russian musicologist Marina Rachmanova, followed by its English translation by Dimitry Shapovalov and Morosan himself. The first part is a concise description, jointly written by Morosan and Rachmanova, of Gretchaninoff’s sacred concertos and numbers for the All-Night Vigil, with the second part given over to a detailed analysis written by Rachmanova alone of his Passion Week music.

All works presented are early, having been composed during the period between 1898 and 1912, evidently a high-water mark for Gretchaninoff for sacred music composition, during which time the composer reached his stride. The musical selection that follows is divided into four large sections according to function and placement in the Orthodox liturgical cycle, and date of composition: (1) a set of four sacred concertos, a genre that figured prominently in the composer’s output from very early on; (2) individual hymns from the All-Night Vigil (combined Vespers and Matins); (3) his opus 58 music for Passion Week (13 numbers); and (4) the composer’s opus 59 All-Night Vigil service (ten numbers). Rounding off the volume are three bilingual appendices that include critical notes, the unison chants that served as the compositional bases for the choral settings, and the system of Roman transliteration employed in the series.

Concerning the repertory, the editors acknowledge that Gretchaninoff’s works are written in...

pdf

Share