Anatoly Grindenko is one of the most important musicians working in the field of early Russian chant. With the male-voice Moscow Patriarchal Choir (amongst other groups) he has over the last few years brought new standards to the interpretation of the important but largely unfamiliar sixteenth- and seventeenth-century repertoire. This anthology is made up of chants from the Vigil Service (that is, Vespers and Matins) and a shorter selection from the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.
A chronological span of something over a century is covered, and various repertoires of chant can therefore be demonstrated, including seventeenth-century znamenny monody and polyphony of both earlier and later periods (strochnoie pienie and partesnoie pienie respectively). There are also a number of particularly beautiful examples of demiestvienny chant, which employs the ison or drone: No. 6, Let my prayer arise and No. 16, a communion chant, are hauntingly beautiful, and receive marvellous performances which allow no subtlety to slip by. The bizarrely dissonant polyphony of the strochnoie chant is deftly handled; for example, in the stikhera of St Andrew of Crete or Praise the Name of the Lord (Nos. 4 and 7). It is all too easy to sing this kind of music, with its extremely unpredictable harmonic sequences and dissonant parallel intervals, loudly and aggressively; but in fact its true qualities only manifest themselves when it is sung, as here, quietly and without exaggeration, projecting the words. It is in this that the Patriarchal Choir has an enormous advantage over most Western choirs, in that its members all regularly sing these texts, if not precisely this music, as part of liturgical celebrations, and their knowledge of the liturgical context pays enormous dividends in the subtlety and flexibility which characterize their singing. They are also perfectly in tune, and there is no Russian 'operatic vibrato'.
As usual with recordings of Russian chant, there are some problems of presentation. It is not sufficient to describe the canon of the Liturgy as ''chant eucharistique'', nor the Hymn of the Cherubim as ''Cherubins'', particularly if their context is not made more explicit. The anonymous note, though eccentric, is not misleading; more seriously, texts should certainly have been provided, especially given the variability of translations of Slavonic titles. Such details notwithstanding, I have no hesitation in declaring this disc one of the most significant releases of Russian chant of the last few years.'