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Celebrating the great feast of the Ascension of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, this program focuses on the special hymns and texts, particularly those of Vespers and Matins, which, along with the readings from the Holy Scriptures, describe, amplify, and celebrate the events of the feast.
Most of the special hymns of Ascension are available at this point only on recordings in Church Slavonic. The most comprehensive collection of festal hymns is a 2-CD set, “The Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ: Selected Hymns” by Hierodeacon Gherman Ryabtsev (B093. This is part of a series in which Hierodeacon Gherman has recorded a double-CD set of hymns for each of the twelve great feasts of the Orthodox Church. The other featured disc, “The Feasts of the Orthodox Liturgical Year,” by the Ural Choir of Perm, Russia, is out of print and no longer available.
Framing the hymns in Church Slavonic are two settings in English -- the first, heard at the opening of the program, is of the festal Exaposteilarion, “With Your disciples watching, O Christ, You were taken up to the Father.” This hymn, along with several other festal exaposteilaria, is heard on the CD “With the Voice of the Archangel” (I-60), recorded by the Archangel Voices ensemble. The final setting, also in English, is of the festal Koinonikon, “God has gone up with a shout,” sung by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Chorale on their CD entitled “Chant: Chant Traditions of the Orthodox Christian Church” (I-67). The next-to-the-last setting is an extremely vivid and festive composition by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, also on the text of the Communion Hymn for Ascension. This recording, by the “Blagovest” Sacred Music Ensemble of Moscow, comes from a remarkable 2-CD set ( A046) that contains all 40 hymn settings composed by Rimsky-Korsakov for the Orthodox Church -- a ‘must have’ for any serious collector of Orthodox recordings.
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