New CD: Great and Holy Pascha

Reader Nick

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GabrielCremeens

Music Director at St. George, Albuquerque, NM
Hi All,
There is a new CD out by the Byzantine Choir of St. George Cathedral in Pittsburgh, PA entitled "Great and Holy Pascha" featuring the hymns of the Paschal Matins service, including the Paschal Canon with Slow Katavasias.

Currently, it can be purchased here:
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/thebyzantinechoirofstgeo

And, future updates in purchase locations can be found here:
http://www.byzantinechant.org/discography.html

Any constructive comments are welcome!

-Nick

Nick, whose scores are you using for the music sung on this CD?
 

Reader Nick

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"Angels in the heavens" is from St. Anthony's Monastery.

The Resurrectional Stichera used for the praises are from St. Gregory Palamas Monastery.

The rest of the music is composed either by James Esper or Stephen Esper, every so often with corrections or changes by me. Most of the music is adapted or inspired by Vatopeidi (the Canon), Mitri el-Murr (the Paschal Stichera and Come, Receive ye light), and Andraos Muaqiel (the Paschal Doxasticon).

The rough drafts of the music can be found at www.byzantinechant.org.
Hopefully, we'll typeset it at some point.

Just as a word of caution, the music, in its current hand-written form, is often orthographically incorrect. In adapting the music Stephen and/or James often ignored certain symbols that are necessary for the melodic line (like the antikenoma, psefiston, or the vareia), or chose the wrong ascending character (oligon, kentemata, or petaste). My apologies ahead of time for not being able to change that in the current version.

Specifically for the Paschal doxasticon, there were many corrections that I made, but sometimes certain melodic phrases overruled my corrections, or the arabic phrase is unique to the arabic original, and therefore was transmitted over in the English adaptation.

-Nick
 
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