Reviews For NEW RELEASE: Roman Hurko's "Liturgy 2000"

NEW RELEASE: Roman Hurko's "Liturgy 2000"

The "Liturgy 2000" composed by Canadian musician Roman Hurko is his endowment for the 2000th anniversary of Christ's birth. The composer evidently is familiar with the Vatican II Ecumenical Council's proposed to the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, for he wrote a liturgy that corresponds to all the rules of "Misa Cantata."
The settings for a St. Chrysostom Liturgy using the Ukrainian text of 1966 is for mixed chorus, without sotoists, and four-part harmony throughout. All voices are scored comfortably, move around neighboring notes, and are easy to sing. The inner voices are treated generously with wide expressive melodies in constant motion and dynamics ranging from pianissimo to forte.
The character of this music is pious and serene, written in church minor modes that establish a link to the ancient Greek tradition. This style of writing has never been used in the Ukrainian Church, thus Mr. Hurko's liturgy is unique.
"Liturgy 2000" was first performed on July 16 in Chicago's St. Volodymyr and Olga Ukrainian Catholic Church. Most of the sacerdotal invocations are done by parish-based priests, the Rt. Rev. Ivan Kortec and the Rev. Yaroslav Mendiuk. The responses are by The Schola Cantorum of St. Peter the Apostle with J. Michael Thompson, director. The singing of the professional chorus is seamless.
Though it contains two Psalms of Typica, the Beatitudes and the Creed, the liturgy lasts only 50 minutes.
"Liturgy 2000" is available on compact disc in Ukrainian shops and record stores at $19.95. For more information visit the composer's webpage at www.romanhurko.com.

I must confess that at first I was not comfortable with the idea of a Ukrainian liturgy being composed for the year 2000. After some thought, I realized that this sentiment came from a part of me that sees Ukrainian culture as defined and static. The image of swarthy villagers in embroidered shirts all traipsing off to a beautiful unheated candle-lit wooden church amid rolling hills of wheat and forests is hard to shake. Luckily, there are those that see other possibilities – they wake the rest of us from our idyllic, calcified slumber.
The composer of Liturgy 2000, Roman Hurko, describes the impulse for his work as much more than a new liturgy. He sees it as pan of the need of every epoch to redefine its relationship to the divine. No wonder he has been working on it for 17 years.
Hurko's 'redefinition' or re-creation is much more organic than revolutionary. It is soundly rooted in the musical tradition of Eastern Rite Slavic church music – calling us to contemplation and a mystical spirituality. This ancient tradition is quite different from the exuberant bombasticism we love to hear and sing in liturgical compositions by composers like Bortniansky and Vedel. Hurko sees this exuberance as one of the threads in the Slavic church music canon. In the other, a more peaceful and meditative approach to the divine is stressed. He has also drawn inspiration from contemporary classical composers like Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki, both of whom have also explored spirituality through what can best be described as slowness.
Herein is the strength of Liturgy 2000. It creates a space in which the listener has the time to slow down, to breathe and to pray. Hurko compares Ukrainian liturgical music to iconography. Icons are not simply story telling devices, they are windows into the divine. Hurko is aiming to open the window for listeners/participants, to bring them in touch with the untouchable.
The singing (and breathing) of Liturgy 2000 by Chicago's Schola Cantorum of St. Peter the Apostle under the direction of J. Michael Thompson, is beautiful and seamless. The choir is able to get across the contemplative nature of the music, and their pronunciation of Ukrainian text is quite impressive. However, they are deficient in two respects. The most glaring is the weakness of the bass voice, which is usually one of the cornerstones of Slavic choral music. It is there in the score, but the basses are either not strong enough or have been restrained by some other force. The other weakness is in the choir's style – at times one can hear 'Mozartian' phrasing rather than that of Eastern liturgy. The singing is beautiful, but it just sometimes doesn't feel nashe.
Roman Hurko is planning to have a choir from Ukraine record the liturgy in the future. It will be fascinating to compare the two at that time.
Is this one a must for your CD collection? In short, yes – whether you are interested in beautiful music, or if you simply need an antidote to the insane world around us, but especially if you are a lover of Slavic and/or Ukrainian liturgical music.