Orthodox liturgical chants from Bulgaria. Somehow it sounds better, more melodic than Gregorian chants. Voices are deeper, more mysterious somehow. This is a collection of well known songs. I’ve been listening to this kind of music for a while now, and the names and the songs are always the same. This is a good version however. Well performed.
From what I can see the songs come from very different times and different places. Ukrainian and Russian composers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. For me these songs somehow always stood a bit apart, but the more I read about it, the more I see connection between them and the world of classical music.
These traditional melodies were used by Rachmaninoff, they were set to music by Tchaikovsky and come back in many other places in Russian music. There are also personal connection. The Bulgarian composer Dobri Christov was a pupil of Dvorak for instance.
That makes this beautiful melodic music take an important place in the development of classical music as a whole.