Rach On! Performing Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil

What was your first encounter with the All-Night Vigil?

The first time I heard it was maybe 10-12 years ago—the Robert Shaw Festival Singers recording. That is a glorious recording. I had known about the piece for many years, but had never heard a performance of it live until I did it myself with the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 2006. For me, with this ensemble, it was really a transformative experience. The sound world fits our group so well. It was a piece where the ensemble grew tremendously through our intensive work.

After we performed, I felt we just had to come back to it and keep exploring this piece specifically, as well as this body of work—what they called at the time the New Russian Choral School. To that end, we did a concert in 2008 that centered on the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the other big Rachmaninoff choral liturgical piece. It is very satisfying to do this repertoire in any situation because it is so beautifully crafted for the voice. It was especially rewarding for our ensemble in Disney Hall—it's been the perfect fit for us.

Tell us more about the New Russian Choral School.

There were a whole group of composers, including Rachmaninoff, from about the 1880s up to the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow. There was this incredible chorus, the Moscow Synodal Choir, that premiered most of these new works. They were providing the laboratory for these composers to explore the potential for a cappella singing.

It's interesting that the New Russian Choral School was happening at the turn of the 20th century. The All-Night Vigil feels so "ancient" when you sing it.

It does. I absolutely agree. There is something so timeless about it, and obviously there is the reliance on ancient chant and in some case faux ancient chant. Also, I think there is an incredible lack of ego in the music that harkens back to anonymous composers in the Middle Ages. There is something very universal and "non-personality" about the All-Night Vigil specifically, and about the style of this music overall. It's easy to forget it represented at the time a radical departure from what had been sung in the Orthodox Church in Russia earlier in the 19th century, which was much more straightforward, much more reliant on single-line chant with very simple harmonies. There were a number of people within the church establishment that considered the big works of Rachmaninoff to be radical and not religious enough, not spiritual enough. It's hard to imagine now, looking back. There is something so transcendent and genuinely mystical about the Vigil.

So did this piece get panned in the beginning?

The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom took the brunt of it. It predates the Vigil by 10 years or so. By the time he wrote and premiered the Vigil there was more acceptance of the style being appropriate to the church service.

There is one element of the Vigil, though, that continued to rankle and rile some of the traditionalists and that's the use of humming. Instruments were, of course, banned from Orthodox Church services. All music had to be transmitting liturgical text. The humming was the closest you could get to being instrumental, non-text vocalism. Some of the traditionalists thought humming was just as bad as bringing a saxophone into the church.

Some people who are not necessarily big lovers of choral music say they love hearing the Vigil and particularly that drone-like humming. They say it is very meditative and transporting.

Yes, it is such an important part of the sound world of the piece.

Why do you think that the Vigil is being performed so widely now? What is it about the piece that attracts choirs and their directors?

It is simply one of the high points of not only the Orthodox tradition but of the a cappella choral tradition throughout the world and throughout history. It just doesn't get any deeper, any more beautiful, any more well-crafted than the All-Night Vigil. I am constantly blown away by it. Here's Rachmaninoff, a great virtuoso pianist, at the height of his fame as a performer and a composer of piano works and symphonic works, who really had little experience writing for choirs. It just seems like the Vigil sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus.

In both the St. John Chrysostom and the Vigil, the sophistication of the way he uses the voices in the choir is extraordinary. I don't know of any other work before this that creates such a kaleidoscope of vocal colors. It is so beautifully orchestrated for choirs. The sophisticated use of divisis, unusual doublings—like the third sopranos and the first tenors doubling a line or the baritones and second altos and first sopranos in three octaves carrying one melodic frame like you've got choirs of woodwinds and strings and bells. Every page of the piece is extraordinary.

It's like an orchestra score for a choir.

It really is. The textures he creates are one-of-a-kind and in their own way they are very instrumental, in terms of the kinds of colors he draws forth from the choir.

There are many more recordings of the All-Night Vigil now, and each so different.

Isn't that the truth! When I was on iTunes recently I saw dozens of recordings. It is so interesting to hear how different they can be from one another, and yet many are quite wonderful. The recording by the Swedish Radio Chorus with the Estonian Tonu Kaljuste conducting is absolutely pristine, just like Swedish choral music is. It is squeaky clean, with everything in place. Another recording by the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir is much more Russian and rough around the edges, but it's still amazing singing.

It's great that one piece can support so many different approaches. So how do you prepare your singers to perform this piece and what advice do you have for other singers working on the Vigil?

The biggest challenge is the endurance and concentration that it takes. Even though it is only 65 minutes, for an a cappella piece, that's a big sing. Pacing oneself through the performance is hugely important.

Part of what makes it difficult in terms of endurance is that the biggest, longest, and most difficult movements come about two-thirds of the way through the piece. So you've already sung 10 substantial movements, and suddenly you get to no. 11, and then no. 12, "The Great Doxology," which is a monster. You have to know what's coming down the pike when you start the piece.

The other aspect that takes a lot of concentration is the tuning and the pitch. For anything a cappella, that can be an issue. But especially in something this lengthy and range-y, it is important to keep every note energized and every phrase supported. If even one line drops in energy, boy, you are sunk. There is just no wiggle room in this piece at all.

The dynamics are so very important, too—being able to go from fortissimo to pianissimo very quickly.

Yes, it is a piece that takes incredible discipline and control from every singer to make all the colors and the huge dynamic range possible.

The Russian style sometimes seems dark and heavy. Doesn't that work against good intonation?

It is a yin-yang that I talk about a lot. It has to have the darkness and the light so that you get the proper color, which is at times dark but at other times has this radiant glow. But at all times you have to make sure there is also a lift to everything, so that it maintains not only the pitch but also vibrancy.

Also, certain sections you have to commit to memory. The fast section at the end of the 9th movement, for example. And the chant refrain that repeats in the "Magnificat" six times. They go by really quickly, and those are things you have to commit to memory and practice in the shower so that somehow it lightly trips off of the tongue. Otherwise, you get too hung up on the mechanics. You have to get past that to get to the spirit of the piece.

One has to go into this piece with eyes wide open, but with any challenge comes incredible rewards. Obviously that is why the piece has become so popular with ensembles and audiences as well. It is so extraordinarily beautiful and moving. I don't know of any other piece that can so transport an audience in quite the same way as the All-Night Vigil does.
Interview conducted by Kelsey Menehan. This article is adapted from The Voice, Winter 2010-11.