Sacred Treasures. Masterpieces of Ukrainian Choral Music. XV – IXX centuries (Medieval, Baroque, Classical, Romantic…

The New York Times: “In its concert of sacred music at Carnegie Hall, the Kyiv Chamber Choir offered evidence that the revival of Ukrainian music has been proceeding apace. The choir has specialized in liturgical works, including the study and interpretation of ancient manuscripts written in long-forgotten regional forms of musical notation. “ “The Kyiv Chamber Choir has only 20 singers, but what singers they are – big, marvelously focused voices, the kind that might easily hold their own on the opera stage but without the kind of operatic vibrato that can make an ensemble rattle”. wrote Washington Post reviewer Joan Reinthaler following their performance at the George Mason Arts Center. “They can sing wonderfully clean unisons and the basses have low E’s to die for,” she added . This album portrays the history of Ukrainian sacred music starting from Middle Ages to Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods. After the Christianization of Kievan Rus (now the territory of Ukraine) in the 10th century together with Baptism, Byzantium brought its musical tradition to Ukraine but through the process of assimilation alongside with the partially kept prior archaic layers of Ukrainian folklore, there appeared its first original sacred songs. This disc represents four unique Ukrainian monodies of the XV-XVI centures. In the XVII century the plentiful musical spheres of Ukraine underwent a revolution – when in a change to the many years of one tone monodies came the multi-voiced, or polyphonic song , from which began the epoch of Ukrainian Baroque. The most prominent representatives of the Ukrainian baroque were M.Diletsky (1630? – 1690?) and S.Pekalytsky (1630-?) Epoch of Classicism is the golden era of Ukrainian music. The works of such eminent masters like Berezovsky, Bortiansky and Vedel took the Ukrainian choral culture into a new orbit, which even until now organically supplementing and complimenting the history of European music