Dec 21, 2020
Before it was “Carol Of The Bells”, it was this. Here in a recording from 1922, nineteen-friggin-twenty-two, with the Ukrainian National Chorus under Alexander Koshetz (or Oleksandr Koshyts).
Koshetz was the man responsible for popularizing this, in concerts of record-setting attendance. He toured through the United States and Canada performing it, thus inspiring its English-language adaptation. What you hear here (here, hear!) was performed only six years after it was first arranged by Leontovych—the year after his death at age 43.
Leontovych