Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil (“Vespers”)

It doesn’t actually take all night to perform, and perform is really the wrong word, as Rachmaninoff’s Vespers or All-Night Vigil is the music for a Saturday night monastic vigil begun in the 4th century and held prior to the early morning services for Sunday in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Rachmaninoff’s setting for the Vespers follows the practice of the 20^th century Russian Orthodox Church and is considered the pinnacle of musical expression for that service. It’s often been performed in concert form which is how we usually hear it, with large forces and in a concert hall, much as we often hear the big Bach oratorios.

Saturday’s performance at St. James Cathedral was of a different order. Cappella Romana, the Portland-based choir devoted to the singing of Eastern Orthodox sacred music from its earliest days to today, performed the Vespers with 26 singers, including soloists.

Artistic director and conductor Alexander Lingas, who like several of the choirmen is a cantor in the Orthodox church, says in the notes that the group chose to present the Vigil as a liturgical work as far as possible by restoring sung items in the service not set by Rachmaninoff, including readings, litanies, psalms and so on, by Russian composers who lived near or contemporaneously to his time. It made a seamless whole and was superbly sung a cappella, musical instruments being banned in Russian Orthodox worship.

We so often consider Rachmaninoff to be a Romantic composer in whose music we can wallow, that to hear it like this can be a surprise.

Cappella Romana sang with little to no vibrato, but with rich, sonorous voices in the men, and boylike clarity in the women. Intervals sounded pure and pitch sense was so exquisitely true that one could almost hear overtones rising in the cathedral. There were fourteen men to twelve women, a different ratio from what we usually have in choirs, so that the men’s voices often held the melody with womens’ lighter ones like the icing on the cake.

There is plenty of vigor in this music and in the way this group performs it, with fervor and praise and vitality even in the softest, most transcendent moments. It helped the large audience that the program sensibly included the Russian in the Roman alphabet side by side with the Russian in Cyrillic and the English translation, so that it was possible to follow what was being sung, as well as excellent notes by Lingas.

Kerry McCarthy’s deep, strong alto solos in Psalm 103 were a highlight, as was bass Adam Steele’s chanting as the Deacon.