Vespers

In 1976, the Orthodox Church in America published a setting of the hymns of Sunday evening Great Vespers in Kievan chant, harmonized and arranged by Boris Ledkovsky. This publication was allowed to go out of print, but there is some demand for it these days, as parish choirs seek to move to an older and more interesting chant tradition than late-19th-century Common Chant.

It is traditional that the Dogmatikon at Great Vespers be chanted in Great Chant (that is, slower and more melismatic). In modern choral scores, this is rarely accomplished; but the Synodal chant-books preserve the medieval Znamenny melodies for us. This is an English adaptation of these hymn settings.

Aleksandr Nikolsky’s “Chants from the All-Night Vigil” is one of those treasures that almost nobody outside of the Russian liturgical music world has heard of. If you search on YouTube you can find a full recording of the piece, and a bit of Googling digs up a scan of the original 19th-century St. Petersburg publication in Slavonic.

Father Guillermo Jünemann Beckschäfer was a German Roman Catholic priest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his youth his family moved to Chile, and he grew up surrounded by Spanish literature. He spent much of his life creating new Spanish translations of the scriptures. He produced a translation of the Old Testament from the Greek Septuagint, which was panned by the Roman Catholic church, as some of its translational choices conflicted with the Vulgate. This Old Testament was not published in his lifetime, but received a posthumous publication in 1993.

Many composers have made arrangements of various chant melodies for “Bless the Lord, O My Soul”, which is made up of selected verses of the introductory psalm from Vespers. The most common chant melody in the Russian tradition is the “Greek Chant” melody. Aleksandr Kastalsky made several different arrangements of this melody. The version presented here (in the original Slavonic) is for male chorus; it was recorded in 2008 by the St. John of San Francisco Men’s Chorale.

Alongside the Slavonic original of Kastalsky’s male chorus setting of "Bless the Lord, O my soul," I here present an English setting.