Don’t be misled into expecting a run-of-the-mill programme of Christmas fare! There’s no gentle lullaby here for the Infant Jesus, no rollicking folk carols – not even in Russian guise with dombras or balalaikas! No, it’s sterner stuff than that: it’s an attempt to reconstruct the Christmas offices from the earliest days of Russian Christianity. Anatole Konotop explains that, although manuscripts containing early liturgical music exist, no living tradition of performance has survived. Much of the reconstruction therefore, is bound to be conjectural. We have highlights of the services of Great Compline, Vespers and Matins, with examples of different types of chant, simple cantillation, hymns and various forms of troparion. Listeners familiar with the sounds of Eastern Orthodoxy in the Greek tradition will recognize, for example, the introduction of the ison (or drone). More surprising are the examples of polyphony from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, composed in a style know as strochny – ‘line style’ – or troestrochny – triple line style, which one might relate to Western two- or three-part organum. Dr Konotop describes lines or melodies “interwoven in harshly dissonant polyphony”. An apt description! – harsh and dissonant they certainly are, and the difference, when compared with Wulfstan’s “mellifluous” tenth-century Winchester organa, is that the dissonances are rarely resolved, whereas in Winchester clashing seconds merge into unison. If the transcriptions and breathless speed of the performances are to be believed, this is something unique in European musical history – a kind of nightmarish Church-Slavonic quodlibet.'