Customer Reviews

Lumières de Chant Byzantine - Lights of Byzantine Chant

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I believe Divna has one of the most original pure female chant voices of the late 20th to early 21st centurys. My Russian wife & I 1st heard her singing voice from a Russian blog in the internet & had to buy a CD from Amazon.com in order to play on a professional stereo system to truly hear her voice. Sadly her 1st studio CD "Lumieres Du Chant Byzantin" was already out of print & we bought "The Glory of Byzantium" which bounced back & forth between her Slavic chants & Lycourgos Angelopoulos' Greek chants. This CD had great production & music but the interposing language & styles was hard to go through. We normally skipped the Greek & listen to the odd number songs to flow with the Slavic. Later we bought "In Concert - Theatre Des Abbesses, Paris", but because this CD was a Live recording, the audiences clapping at the end of each song forces one out of the spiritual plane & into the concert hall. If you have one of these 2 recordings, this CD "Lumières de Chant Byzantine - Lights of Byzantine Chant" will offer a few new songs, but is maybe a repackaging of her 1st CD. Can anyone verify this? In fact the back cover of this CD has the same photograph of Divna as the front cover of the 1st CD. Also looking at the 1st CD, Amazon.com doesn't give a listing of the songs. Check out ASIN: B000M05W60. Notice that the 1st part of the title of this listing is in French & the 2nd part is an English translation. The real title of this CD matches the older CD title but Amazon.com writes the last word "Byzantin" as "Byzantine" & placed a "de" in place of a "Du". In this just a case of bad French? The plus side of this CD is that it doesn't bounce back & forth between the Slavic & Greek styles, & is a balanced studio recording rather than a Live recording. Therefore this CD may offer you Divna's music pure & through. All inner notes are in French.

As with the other review a simple musical history is listed:
The CD is called "Lights of Byzantine Chant" yet Divna sings mostly Russian & Serbian chants which came from or developed from "Byzantine Chant" which is Greek & was part of the eastern half of the old Roman Empire. Slavic chants are about 700 years later then Byzantine, have a different culture language, & use simpler western chord structures

A "5" for the music but gets a "4" for the repackaging

I am a fan of Christian chant, and Divna takes things to a new level. Not only is the quality of her voice alone is stunning, but she also sings with feeling, and not (as her name might imply!) as merely a diva. The drone (or "backing vocals") are themselves beautiful but unobtrusive.

This album is sung mostly in Church Slavonic, with some Greek. The lyrics are printed in the liner notes in French.

I have come to love every cd that Divna and her choir have released. When I'm too tired to sleep, I'll put one of her cds on and drift off to sleep as if I were listening to the angels in Heaven.