Christos Razdajetsja! Thanks to Rich Custer for sharing this link! Great pace, great enunciation by the priest! Wow!

http://www.rusynmedia.org/Divine%20Liturgy%20-%20Christmas%2025-Dec-2011%20Midzilabirci%20SK.mp3

Great recording, and your critique was spot on. I enjoyed listening to it very much. It also proved to be a good study in DL practice - US vs. the "Old Country" (Antiphons taken in full with litanies, etc.). Thank you and Rich Custer both for sharing!

For anyone who didn't have the opportunity to learn to sing in Slavonic under the tutelage of one of our immigrant or first generation priests or cantors, following along with the priest on this clip with a 'Latinika' text of the liturgy (such as the old 'Chlib Duse') will let you pick up the proper Rusyn stylizations.
I know that in neither ACROD nor the BCC there is much use of the old language these days, but we still sing hymns, carols etc... so it comes in handy!

Thank you for posting the link!

I was under the impression that Slavonic was still generously used in ACROD. Sad to hear that is not the case.

In Christ,
Anthony

Thanks for the link it bropught me back to my childhood when the Liturgy was only in Slavonic. It was easy to follow an I even started to sing along.

Steve

I found it amazing that the hymns and tones used in this liturgy are almost identical to those we were using prior to the RDL, which leads me to wonder why the Inter-Eparchial Liturgical Commission decided to depart from what the people know in favor of a kind of bowdlerized Boksaj which was both unfamiliar and difficult to sing. If anything, it would seem to be a retrogression that distanced the Metropolia from the Mother Church, where, of course, the living tradition of Prostopinje had continued to develop.

On our way to Philadelphia this weekend, my wife and I played a CD I burned from the file, singing along with the chant in proper Slavonic as we learned as children, just as we continue to do in our parishes of ACROD, a bit of Slavonic and mostly in English. I have to mention and thank the late Bishop John Martin and the late Metropolitan Nicholas of ACROD for sheparding translations and a transliteration that attempted to be true to the actual singing and chant traditions of the parishes. A tough task as each region and even village had their own 'twist' to prostopenije - both in Europe and here - but at least they tried. It's too bad that the possessors of the prostopenije in the west - both Greek Catholic and Orthodox - could not have attempted to work together to come up a common English version. As I joked with our neighboring BCC priest recently - the only way we can sing together is in Slavonic! That is a shame!