By Greg Stepanich
The music of faith may mean most to the worshippers for whose ears it ultimately is meant, but the sensual beauty of some composition in these traditions, especially when well-performed, has a way of suspending doubt.
On Saturday night at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale, the Miami-based concert choir Seraphic Fire continued its opening week of sold-out concerts with an intense, ravishing reading of the Rachmaninov All-Night Vigil (Op. 37), surely one of the only times this work has been done in its entirety on local concert stages. Expanded to 25 members from its usual 13 to 17, the choir, made up of what director Patrick Dupré Quigley called “stellar musical athletes,” expertly informed the shapes and hues of this piece in a way that brought listeners close to the feast-eve ecstatic devotion for which this music is intended.
Only at the very end of this long 13-section work did the sound begin to fray in the soprano reaches, testimony to the difficulty of the music and the strain it places on voices over its lengthy duration. It also reflected Quigley’s aggressive approach: fast tempos, dynamics favoring the louder end, and an incisive attack in passages such as the line beginning Yezhe yesu ugotoval in the fifth section, Now Let Thy Servant Depart (Nynye otpushchayeshi; known in the Latin rite as Nunc dimittis). Here, the basses were forceful and strong, creating a new, fresh color after the sobriety of the opening.
This was not an interpretation for listeners accustomed to the slow, liquid, somber readings of this music familiar from a number of old Soviet and Russian recordings. This was in line with Quigley’s highly rhythmic, vigorous direction of Baroque music, and the way, for example, that the chorus snapped off the Sviat, sviat, sviat (Holy, holy, holy) in the Blessed Art Thou, O Lord (Blagosloven yesi, Ghospodi), would not be to everyone’s taste.
But what the Rachmaninov may have lost in tenderness and a feeling of rapt devotion, it gained in variety and range, and in a way that illuminated the earthy, vital folk roots of the music. Composed in 1915, the Vigil (also known as the Vespers) offers a rare opportunity to hear Rachmaninov as a vocal composer. His three early operas are almost never heard, nor are his fine cantata, Spring, or the Three Russian Folksongs, a delectable choral work.
Aided in particular by a sonorous bass section that had all the profondo notes (Joshua Hillman, Steven Hyrcelak and Kenneth Kellogg), the choir demonstrated just how much resource Rachmaninov brought to his task of setting this large text of familiar Christian prayer. The radiance of the best-known section, Rejoice, O Virgin (Bogoroditsye Devo, raduysia, also known as the Ave Maria), was followed by a setting of Glory to God in the Highest (Slava v vishnih Bogu) that sounded virile Saturday night, and a setting of Praise the Name of the Lord (Hvalite imya Ghospodne) that was distinctly redolent of a country folksong.
Tenor Bryon Grohman (one of several members familiar to Palm Beach County audiences, along with mezzo-soprano Ceci Dadisman, tenor Joshua Habermann, and baritone Graham Fandrei) sang his solo lines with a reedy force that had a keening quality apt for such fervent music, and chorus master James Bass, a one-time Orthodox cantor, sang interpolated chant lines between many of the sections.
Grohman also sang an effective solo in the concert’s opening work, a setting of Psalm 41, Blessed Is He Who Considers the Poor (Blazhen razumevayay na nischa i uboga), by Alexander Arkhangelsky (1846-1926), well-known in Russia for his late 19th-century reform of Orthodox music. It closed with a traditional Ukrainian song – Great God (Bozhe veliki) – that was routinely sung during Ukraine’s push for independence in the early 1990s. Both performances had richness and power.
These concerts open the ninth season for Seraphic Fire, and if there were any doubt that the choir has by now firmly established itself as a must-have ticket for devotees of classical music in South Florida, these performances would have dispelled it. Here was an interpretation that brought something different to a beloved work of Russian late Romanticism and at the same time fulfilled it, in the way that can only be done by fine musicians working at their peak.
Seraphic Fire presents this program again today at Miami Beach Community Church in Miami Beach. The concert begins at 4 p.m. The concert is sold out, but more information can be had by calling 305-285-9060.