Paraclete Naxos Archive

RACHMANINOV: All-Night Vigil (Vespers and Matins) – soloists/ dir. by Peter Jermilhov – Paraclete

by Audiophile Audition | Mar 27, 2017 | SACD & Other Hi-Res Reviews

We are invited to lift our spirits through a deeply inspired performance of Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil. RACHMANINOV: All-Night Vigil (Vespers and Matins), Op. 37 – Mariya Berezovska, alto/ Dmitry Ivanchenko, tenor/ Gloriae Dei Cantores/ The St. Romanos Cappella/ The Patriarch Tikhon Choir/ The Washington Master Chorale/ Peter Jermihov – Paraclete multichannel SACD GDCD 063, 66:34 (3/3/17) [Distr. by Naxos] *****: Sergei Rachmaninov, who always maintained strong, religious convictions, conceived his “The Most Important Hymns of the All-Night Vigil” for a performance of 10 March 1915, meant as a conglomerate of selected liturgical hymns and canticles now condensed into a choral cycle. Rachmaninov, however, did not intend in his fifteen movements to supplant any Orthodox ritual: he wished to express a subjective declaration of religious devotion in terms of the Greek, Klevan, and Great Znamenny (melismatic) Chants which he had come to admire, despite any personal animosity he had sustained in courting his cousin for marriage and having encountered Church resistance. Rachmaninov combined ten, pre-existing chants with five freely composed settings, each of which exploits the modal intervals of a third, fourth, and fifth, so they become indistinguishable from ancient settings, given the composer’s absorption of the essential, syntactical doxology. The […]