Sacred Choral Concertos (Complete edition)

Description

Dmitry Bortniansky (1751-1825), is among the most famous and most performed composers of Slavic choral music. He is credited with developing the genre of the sacred choral concerto (comparable to the Western a cappella motet or cantata) to its highest level. His thirty-five choral concertos for four voices were first published as a set in the early nineteenth century, however then they were published with only a Cyrillic text. What distinguishes the present edition is the addition, for the first time, of the Church Slavonic text in transliteration directly in the scores alongside the Cyrillic letters. In addition, the present Urtext edition is based on an exhaustive comparison of all early sources preserved in Austrian, British, and Russian archives. The editor of this edition has placed special emphasis on presenting an exact rendering of the dynamics and expressive markings as conceived by the composer himself, amending all inaccuracies of the edition edited by Tchaikovsky (1882). Similarly, the careful transliteration reflects the manner in which Church Slavonic was pronounced in Bortniansky's day.