ExclusiveLeontovych: Carol Of The Bells - Christmas Carol

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Mykola Leontovych: Carol Of The Bells - Christmas Carol. This beautiful piece was provided by Superlala_Germany. It is a royalty free music from Pond5.com.

Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych was a Ukrainian composer, conductor, ethnomusicologist and teacher. His music was inspired by the Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko and the Ukrainian National Music School. Leontovych specialised in a cappella choral music, ranging from original compositions to church music and elaborate arrangements of folk music.

The conductor of the Ukrainian National Choir, Oleksandr Kosyts, asked the Ukrainian composer Leontovich to create a piece based on traditional Ukrainian folk songs and chants, and the resulting new work for choir, Shchedryk (Song), is based on four tones that Leontovich found in a Ukrainian collection.

The original Ukrainian folk tale associated with the song was linked to the coming New Year, which in pre-Christian Ukraine was celebrated with the arrival of spring in April. The original Ukrainian title translates as "the generous one", or perhaps derives from the Ukrainian word for bountiful (shchedryj), and tells the story of a swallow that flies into a household to announce the bountiful year the family will have.

With the introduction of Christianity to Ukraine and the adoption of the Julian calendar, the celebration of the New Year was moved from April to January, and the holiday with which the song was originally associated became Malanka, the eve of the Julian New Year (the night of 13-14 January in the Gregorian calendar). The songs sung on this occasion are known as shchedrivky.

The song was first performed by Ukrainian students at Kyiv University in December 1916, and introduced to Western audiences by the Ukrainian National Chorus during its concert tour of Europe in 1919. The tour was organised to drum up support for the fledgling independent nation of Ukraine, which had declared its independence but which the Bolshevik government in Moscow refused to recognise.

The song premiered in the United States on 5 October 1922 to a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall, and American audiences fell in love with the Ukrainian song. The original work was intended to be sung a cappella by a mixed four-part choir.

The video was captured by Simone Schlegel in Switzerland and edited by Wenjing Ma.





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