This is a good disc to recall the highlights of this service as sung in a large Slavonic parish, and will delight those who attend them. Many do: the Easter service is one which no Slav would miss, even if they seldom or never go to church otherwise. (One priest claims to have heard an Easter-goer remark, "What a strange religion. Every time I come to church they sing "Christ is Risen.") The constraint of selecting a very few parts of this long service give it more of the sense of a performance than, say the Panikhida ("requiem," Liturgica catalog number AJ042) which is all of a piece and as so, sounds like a service -- and is another service no Slav would miss.

To hear the full Easter service in all its fullness, see "The Holy and Great Feast of Easter " (Liturgica catalog number AJ015), a two-CD set. This an important point. We cannot leave these crucial services as a few highlights culled from several hours of generally unintelligible activity. In a very favorable review of San Francisco's production of Messaien's St. Francis, Alex Ross says "sitting through the opera is at times a physical challenge - -even Wagner knew better than to write a two-hour second act -- yet the experience leaves one feeling strangely liberated. It harks back to one of those archaic Christian liturgies in which spells of boredom give way to precisely staged epiphanies--as when, in the Greek Orthodox Easter service, the church goes dark and the light of a single candle remains."