Rendezvous at The Russian Tea Rooms

One thing you'll appreciate soon after you begin listening to this recording of Russian sacred Christmas music is how different Russian Orthodox Church traditions are from their Western counterparts. We are brought in touch with these differences only because of the remarkable efforts of Anatoly Grindenko and his Russian Patriarchate Choir, who nearly single-handedly restored ancient Orthodox liturgy to modern practice. This recording presents both monophonic and polyphonic chants, here recorded for the first time, which were used in various Russian monasteries during the 16th and 17th centuries. You won't recognize anything "Christmasy" here–the chants are specifically Russian, complete with drones and lots of open fourths and fifths, and follow the form of a service known as the "Vigil of the Nativity of Christ."

Since the early 1990s, the excellent French label Opus 111 has released a number of recordings by the Russian Patriarchate Choir, which was founded in 1980 by Anatoly Grindenko. Grindenko, a successful performer on the double-bass and viola de gamba, has combined a devotion to the living tradition of the Orthodox liturgy with important and original musicological scholarship. The result has been the careful editing and inspired performance of a number of manuscripts representing early, and sometimes all but lost, traditions of Orthodox chant.

The Russian Orthodox music presented here comes from the music for Great Lent, which is a meditation on the meaning of Holy Week. Great Lent or Velikiy Post, is the most important and one of the longest of the four Lenten periods in the year. It opens with a powerfully meditative chant 'Let all mortal flesh keep silent' which is specially sung only once a year along with the Old Testament lamentation 'By the rivers of Babylon'. The music here is, as usual with Orthodox chant, profoundly solemn and deeply meditative - some would say even mystical.