#leontovich

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.