Vasily Titov and the Russian Baroque: Selected Choral Works. Transcribed and edited by Olga Dolskaya. (Monuments of Russian Sacred Music, ser. XIII, 2.) Madison, Conn.: Musica Russica, 1995. [From the gen. ed., acknowledgments, introd. in Rus., Eng., p. xi-xxix; ill., 5 p.; score, 186 p.; appendixes (Titov: The Great Many Years; crit. notes; select bibliog. on music of the Russian Baroque; the Russica transliteration system), p. 189-203. Cloth. ISBN 0-96294660-3-6. $49.00.] Olga Dolskaya's edition of vocal works by the late seventeenth-century Russian composer Polikarpovich Titov (ca. 1650-ca. 1715) is the first in a series of historical editions offered by Musica Russica in its series Monuments of Russian Sacred Music. (The next issue in the historical series will cover Dmitrii Stepanovich Bortnianskii's sacred concertos for single choir, and further volumes will range in focus from chant to concertos by Maksym Berezovs'kyi and Stepan Anikievich Degtiarev.) Although Dolskaya's work fits seamlessly with Musica Russica's debut anthology, One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music (ed. Vladimir Morosan, [1991]), her work stands on its own, offering a provocative glimpse into a little-known repertory now published in a format accessible both to the specialist and to the general user. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the Musica Russica series is the obvious desire of all concerned to make this music accessible; all of the pieces are available in single offprints, modestly priced, ready and waiting For diverse choral groups to bring before an audience. Titov was one of the most important composers of kontserty in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Kontserty are settings of primarily sacred or liturgical texts for various a cappella groupings, most often four-, five-, eight-, and twelve-part choirs, although a few more massive settings exist as well. Dolskaya certainly selected Titov because he was the most talented representative of the genre but, as she points out, he was only one of many Russian and Ukrainian composers who wrote kontserty. In a related article, Vasilii Titov and the 'Moscow' Baroque, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 118 [1993]; 203-22), Dolskaya notes that there are at least fifty known composers of the genre dating as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, and in Russian and Ukrainian archives there are literally stacks of kontsert manuscripts, mostly anonymous and unexamined. The style of these works, as the borrowed term kontsert suggests, represents a complex musical and cultural synthesis of Russian liturgical vocal tradition with Western harmonic language. Dolskaya's discussion of Titov's works makes it clear, however, that there is more to the style than synthesis; the works use specific, selected elements of Western practice, refracted through the powerful lens of Orthodox liturgical tradition. Thus, for example, Dolskaya emphasizes the linear, text-dominated approach taken by Titov and other Russian composers of kontserty, an approach that might easily be overwhelmed in modern performances by the seemingly familiar tonal language. Similarly, she describes the process of variantnost', or variation, in which melodic ideas are linked by continual and subtle alterations, a fundamental element of the kontsert style that is important in both Russian chant and folk polyphony as well. Dolskaya suggests that, in addition to recognizing the stylistic importance of variantnost', the approach may also tell us something about performance practice. She notes that the tightly interwoven vocal parts make it unlikely that the singers were spatially separated in performance. In other words, no Venetian-style cori spezzati in Muscovy. The sparse iconographical evidence tends to confirm this point. One of the few depictions of Muscovite singers shows a cluster of about a dozen men and boys performing together from separate partbooks, reproduced in Vladimir Morosan, Choral Performance in Pre-Revolutionary Russia, Russian Music Studies, 17 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986: reprint, rev. …