Lord, Now Lettest Thou, No. 1b Nine otpushchayeshi 4-Part - Sheet Music

This is a lovely piece, suitable for small choirs and an excellent introduction to the works of Kastalsky, a great choral master of the early 20th century. Kastalsky did not write a single unified setting of the AllNight Vigil service, choosing instead to compose several different settings for nearly every unchanging element of that service; altogether, he wrote three settings of the Canticle of St. Symeon Nîñe otpushcháyeshï [Lord, Now Lettest Thou]. Moreover, in several instancesthe present hymn being one of themhe arranged different variants of the same composition, for small choir, for singlegender choirs, and in the case of this piece, a variant with baritone solo and chorus (our cat. no. Ks111), which, judging from its placement in the first edition, was likely the composer's original version. Kastalsky called this setting demestvenny, a term that refers to demestvenny chant and demestvenny polyphony, a particular type of Russian medieval chant the composer was studying at the time. However, it does not use any recognizable melody of demestvenny chant. In fact, the term more likely indicates that this setting is freely composed, rather than being based on a preexisting chant, which was one of the several interpretations given to the term demestvenny by scholars at the time. (The composer Gretchaninoff also used the term demestvenny in reference to his Liturgia domestica, op. 79, but with a somewhat different meaning, suggesting that it was composed for extraliturgical, concert use, rather than a liturgical context).