Spring Grass Under the Snow

Rachmaninov: Vespers (All-Night Vigil)
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Paul Hillier
Harmonia Mundi HMU807384
2005

***


Rachmaninov wrote his Vespers and All-Night Vigil in 1915. Scored for a cappella choir, it is a lodestone of lush, aching Russian music, musically accessible but harmonically rich and mystically profound. I have a very interesting recording of these settings from some years ago by the English all-male Choir of King's College, Cambridge under Stephen Cleobury, which is one of those old-recipe-made-with-new-ingredients kinda things. Very nice, but different. This present Harmonia Mundi recording sticks with the regular formula, using a mature mixed choir in an appropriately reverberant acoustic.

It's a cliché, I know, but either from weather or vastness or oppressive government or whatever, there is a sense in much Russian music of artistic expression coming from a place of great pain and difficulty, a pall that's almost despair but not quite. Rachmaninov is firmly, undeniably Russian in his bone marrow. He is sometimes criticized for being too musically conservative for his time, or too easily sentimental; I don't know that I buy those criticisms, but in any case there's almost no artifice to this setting. It would be hard to write simpler, more direct music for these resources than this. I too easily picture the remote, snow-swept steppes of Siberia when I listen to Rachmaninov (or maybe Stalingrad during the siege), and this choral setting gives us that ache in its most unadorned form. This is all the ache with the orchestration and almost all structure removed, like a Bodyworks exhibit where the flesh is jesused away and only the nerves remain.

(Rachmaninov requested that the Vespers' fifth movement be played at his funeral. It's not hard to see why. Like his piano Prelude in b minor Op. 32, No 10, this movement seems to tell us in mystical terms about the end of something in a way which brooks no rebuttal.)

Like other Russian choral music, this extended setting places great demands on the choir's bass section, and a choir's low-frequency performance has quite a bearing on how the piece comes off. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir from this recording, while not Russian, is close enough to pass as the real thing. I have a recording of the Vespers by the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir which makes quick work of these low tones; it sounds like either an anomaly in the vocal cords or a third testicle were required to get into the bass section of that choir. But barring these super-human feats, the EPCC pulls this score off as well as any non-Russian choir I've heard.

The recording is excellent. If you're not familiar with this piece, I urge you to make acquaintance. I know of no recording I would recommend as highly as this one.