Mixed Chorus

While Stevan Mokranjac is the best-known Serbian composer of sacred works, Stanislav Binički is better known in secular circles as Serbia’s foremost composer. He composed the first opera in Serbo-Croat, and also wrote the “Marš na Drinu” (March to the Drina) to commemorate a Serbian victory against the armies of the Habsburgs in 1914. However, he also composed a few sacred pieces, such as this Cherubic Hymn presented here in English.

Bortniansky is famous for two Cherubic Hymns. No. 7 is rightly famous for its ethereal qualities; there exist many professional recordings. The No. 5, on the other hand, is rarely recorded, but is widely used by small church choirs due to its ease of performance. Unfortunately, unless very sensitively handled, the Bortniansky No. 5 can come across as a choral waltz.

This is one of my own compositions dating from sometime around 2004 or so. Certain Ukrainians have told me it sounds Ukrainian.

Many thanks to Kevin Lawrence for editorial advice.

I found this setting of the Cherubic Hymn on Boris Tarakanov’s Russian Sacred Music page. Unfortunately, it was a low-quality scan of a very hastily-scribbled manuscript. It had only two dynamic markings which seemed rather arbitrarily chosen, and no tempo markings. Additionally, it had several errors which led to horrible-sounding passages.

The default setting of the Exaposteilarion of Great and Holy Friday for those in the Russian tradition seems to be one of the Kievan chant settings, so why am I adding my voice to the din? Well, for years I have thought about composing a full-choir companion setting to my own treble-trio version. Then a couple weeks ago I realized that in fact the Kievan chant setting would work just fine with it.

It’s nearly impossible to find biographical information for Alexander Alexandrovich Yegorov. Born in 1887, he studied under Azeyev, Klenovsky, Liadov and Sokolov at the Court Chapel, then graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1912. Apart from composition, he busied himself with teaching choral and instrumental music in the public schools of St. Petersburg and Mogilev until he was appointed Professor of Music at the Petrograd Conservatory in 1920, where he remained until shortly before his death in 1959.