| Rachmaninov All Night Vigil |
|
|
Conductor's Note
Welcome to tonight's performance, and the start of the IFC's 2005 season. We are celebrating the coming of Spring this year with a wealth of good tunes. At first glance, tonight's program may seem a somewhat random collection of unrelated works - a programmatic overture based on a Shakespeare play, variations of a theme that many composers felt obliged to tackle, and an unaccompanied choral work. But in fact these works are bound together by the thread of plainchant. The first bars of his Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet are intended to depict the friar, and Tchaikovsky provides material modelled on the chants used in the Orthodox Church, thus setting this European tale into a familiar context for his listeners. Rachmaninov uses the real thing in his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini with the 'Dies Irae' plainchant gradually creeping into the music. Rachmaninov was haunted by this plainchant his entire life, but its inclusion here is curious as composers rarely use the variation form for "autobiographical" musical statements. Paganini used his theme for pyrotechnical displays of his own which, some said, were nourished by the Devil himself, so perhaps Rachmaninov was merely exorcising the Evil Eye from what he already knew would be his last major work. If Rachmaninov ever sinned, he surely atoned with his setting of the All-Night Vigil [Vespers] (settings of texts used during the all night watch kept in church on Easter Eve). Some of the movements use the Orthodox plainsong as their basis, but many are freely composed using melodies in the style of plainsong. Much of the choir sings stepwise lines for much of the work (in imitation of plainchant, which is constructed of mostly adjacent notes), but despite this self-imposed constraint, Rachmaninov creates a sound would with a monumental depth of feeling and colour, and one can almost smell the plumes of incense spiralling through the mystical lighting of an Orthodox church. Nicholas Smith All-Night Vigil Programme Notes Sergei Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil, Opus 37, stands as the crowning achievement of the "Golden Age" of Russian Orthodox sacred choral music premiering 10 March 1915 in a concert by the Moscow Synodal Choir. The piece is a setting of the All-Night Vigil service, a curious liturgical concatenation of the three services - Vespers, Matins, and First Hour - which was introduced in Russia in the fourteenth century, but proved to be popular and enduring in Russia alone of all Orthodox nations. For his setting Rachmaninov chose fifteen major psalms and hymns that form the unchanging framework of the Resurrectional Vigil (the service celebrated every Saturday evening). The music is for chorus a cappella, the traditional vocal complement in the Russian Orthodox Church, which has maintained the ancient-Christian patristic prohibition against musical instruments of any kind. Ten of the fifteen hymns are based on unison chant melodies drawn from the service as it would have been sung in Medieval Russia; for the remaining five sections Rachmaninov composed what amount to his own chant melodies. As in all chant-based works, the sacred text occupies a position of prime importance. In fact it serves as the main form-determining element in each section. Moreover, to ensure the clear declamation of the text, the choral texture is typically homorhythmic: there is very little imitative polyphony and no fugal writing whatsoever. The tonal vocabulary is quite traditional, eschewing all elements of "modernism". Within these seemingly austere limits, Rachmaninov created a monumental work that elevates the spirit by its lofty expressiveness and captivates the ear by its sheer beauty. Through the fixed texts of the Vigil - the sung prayers, psalms, and hymns - the composer depicts the epic grandeur of humanity's worshipful encounter with its Creator. The Vesperal portion of the service focuses on the themes of the Creation and the coming into it of the Eternal Light - the Incarnation of Christ. The Matins portion has a different emphasis: the celebration (which takes place every Sunday) of the single most important event in Christian cosmology - the Resurrection of Christ. (The Russian word for Sunday is Voskresen'ye - resurrection.) As his musical vehicle, Rachmaninov uses a living, breathings instrument - the human chorus - in a way that few composers have used it before or since. His choral writing makes full use of the rich sonority and timbral colors that were developed by his predecessors in the Russian choral school of the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries. Voices combine and divide in a seemingly endless variety of ways, soaring heavenward and plunging into the depths, praising and supplicating, as the liturgical text and the individual vision of the composer direct them. At times, solo voices and groups of voices take on dramatic identities, yet the persistent use of chant keeps their utterings within the epic realm. Vladimir Morosan Copyright © 2005 Musica Russica |
|||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
