With two discs of music and a 40-page booklet, this release offers a lot to digest. The booklet, in small print and all in English, contains enough information to fill a modest-sized book if it were issued on its own. What's heard on the two discs is two versions of the Greek Orthodox liturgy "as," to quote the booklet, "a priest and a deacon might celebrate it on an ordinary Sunday." Only a sermon is omitted. The music, all Byzantine chant, is drawn from traditional repertories, and the recording was made in a "natural ...
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With two discs of music and a 40-page booklet, this release offers a lot to digest. The booklet, in small print and all in English, contains enough information to fill a modest-sized book if it were issued on its own. What's heard on the two discs is two versions of the Greek Orthodox liturgy "as," to quote the booklet, "a priest and a deacon might celebrate it on an ordinary Sunday." Only a sermon is omitted. The music, all Byzantine chant, is drawn from traditional repertories, and the recording was made in a "natural church acoustic." One way in which the liturgy differs from that of the Western church is that it is in English; the English texts are reproduced in the booklet. The essays cover a good deal of ground that will be of most interest to people directly connected to the music, exploring the history of Byzantine chant at a specialist level (the word "neume," for example, meaning the notational units similar to those in Western chant manuscrips, is not defined), how the chants heard here fit...
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