The Russian Patriarchate Choir's latest recording is of music from a manuscript compiled during the last two years of the 16th century and the first of the 17th at the Monastery of Suprasl, in Poland. This book, having been lost at some time during the 1930s, was recovered in 1972 by the musicologist Anatoly Konotop (though the insert notes do not specify how or where), upon whose painstaking research, restoration and transcription work this recording is based. What is intriguing about this manuscript source is that the chant repertory it contains has its origins in traditions as diverse as those of Mount Athos and the Kievan Monastery of the Caves.
The chant written at Suprasl itself shows the influences of the chant traditions of Greece, Constantinople, Bulgaria, Rumania and Russia. There are some breathtakingly beautiful chants here, notably the monumental Cherubic Hymn, clearly showing Balkan influence, and the verses sung in honour of St Joseph of Arimathea on Holy Friday. They both demonstrate to perfection the long-breathed melodic style which characterizes this music. Also worthy of note is the use of the drone (ison), to be heard today in chant traditions such as the Greek and the Rumanian, and which Konotop sees, convincingly, by implication in the Demestvenny style chants in the Suprasl source.
The Russian Patriarchate Choir sings, as ever, with superb blend and breath control (it is hard to believe that the singers ever do actually breathe, so seamless are their melodic lines) and a profound feeling for the spiritual impetus and liturgical purpose behind this extraordinary music. This recording is something quite remarkable, adding as it does something genuinely new to our knowledge of the chant of the Christian Church. IVAN MOODY