Sacred Music - From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century [CD 29]

Дмитрий Бортнянский
01 - Let My Prayer Arise (No.2) (Da Ispravitsia Molitva Moia) [06:53]
Джузеппе Сарти
02 - Now The Powers Of Heaven (Nyne Sily Nebesnyia) [05:36]
Дмитрий Бортнянский
03 - The Cherubic Hymn (No.7) (Kheruvimskaia Pesn) [03:54]
Василий Титов
04 - Glory / Only-Begotten Son (Slava / Yedinorodnyi Syne) [03:15]
Бальдассаре Галуппи
05 - In The Flesh Thou Didst Fall Asleep (Plotiyu Usnuv) [02:46]
Дмитрий Бортнянский
06 - I Lift Up My Eyes To The Mountains (Choral Concerto No.24) (Vozvedokh Ochi Moyi V Gory) [06:11]
Николай Дилецкий
07 - Praise The Name Fo The Lord (Khvalite Imia Gospodne) [02:01]
Дмитрий Бортнянский
08 - With My Voice I Cried Out To The Lord (Choral Concerto No.27) (Glasom Moim Ko Gospodu Vozzvakh) [09:05]
Артемий Ведель
09 - By The Rivers Of Babylon (Na Rekakh Vavilonskikh) [10:13]
Дмитрий Бортнянский
10 - Lord, Make Me To Know My End (Choral Concerto No.32) (Skazhi Mi, Gospodi, Konchinu Moyu) [08:20]
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
All-Night Vigil Op.37. Vespers:
11 - Come, Let Us Worship [02:48]
12 - Praise The Lord, O My Soul [04:48]
13 - Blessed Is The Man [04:16]
14 - O Gentle Light [03:19]
15 - Lord, Now Lettest Thou [03:32]
16 - Rejoice, O Virgin [02:45]
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Dir. Paul Hillier

ORTHODOX MUSIC

‘The tradition of the Orthodox Church is expressed not only through words, not only through the actions and gestures used in
worship, but also through art.’ – Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church

In his comprehensive book on Orthodox Christianity, Timothy Ware notes that to outsiders, Orthodoxy may seem akin to
all other Christian religions, appearing like ‘Roman Catholicism without the pope’. He then argues that it is quite distinct
from any religious system in the West. The Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople was based on a fundamental
disagreement as to the nature of the Holy Trinity; to the Orthodox, God the Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are inextricably
‘one in essence and undivided’. The Schism also allowed the Orthodox Church to assume a distinct attitude toward visual art
and music. In the Orthodox faith, theology, scripture, mysticism, visual art, and music too, are all interdependent. Although
Orthodox believers attach importance to the Bible, it in itself is not their alpha and omega. They believe that the ‘powers of
heaven’ are channelled not just through the written word, but also through visual icons, through the fragrance of incense,
and through the resonance of music.

The very act of singing is mentioned many times during Orthodox services. In an opening prayer of the Divine Liturgy of
St John Chrysostom (the Orthodox equivalent to the Roman Catholic Mass), the choir invokes the attention of God: ‘Hear
Thou those who now sing Alleluia to Thee.’ The Cherubic Hymn – sung in the middle of the service – professes that in
singing, mortals are able to ‘lay aside all earthly care’ and become like the angelic host. In Church Slavic (i.e. Slavonic, the
ecclesiastical language of the Eastern Slavs) the very word dukh means both ‘soul’ and ‘breath’. In singing, the spirit and
breath indeed become one.


bells are allowed inside the church walls. Despite this restriction, or because of it, unaccompanied singing flourished and
continues to flourish in Russia and Ukraine. The composers for the churches of Kiev, St Petersburg and Moscow evolved
their own musical idioms and genres, adapting Western concertato techniques to the Orthodox a cappella style. Western
triadic singing first crept into Orthodox music via Ukraine’s Roman Catholic neighbour, Poland. Devotional songs in the
vernacular sung by roving musicians were the first to reflect this influence. Nikolai Diletsky and Vasily Titov represent the
earliest generation of composers who formally introduced Western harmonic conventions and concertato style to Orthodox
sacred music. Their partesny kontserty (partbook concertos), with pithy declamatory statements exchanged between voice
parts, resemble the motets of Schutz or Gabrieli. In accordance with Diletsky’s own treatise Grammatika musikiyskago
peniya, their compositions were also the first systematically to embody the notion that the affect (or mood) of the music
should mirror the affect of its sacred text.

When Peter the Great moved the capital of the Russian empire from Moscow westwards to St Petersburg in the early eighteenth
century, he simultaneously initiated a westernisation of Russian culture. His policies led to the practice of importing foreign
composers, among them Baldassare Galuppi, who visited Russia from 1765 to 1768. Galuppi adapted his Venetian manner of
florid vocal writing, balanced melodic phrases, and light imitative counterpoint to Slavonic texts and the a cappella medium.
His Italo-Slavic style was then further developed by Giuseppe Sarti, who served as the court maestro di cappella from 1784
to 1801, and by Dmitry Bortniansky.

Bortniansky, born in Ukraine and sent to St Petersburg in his childhood to sing at the Pridvornaya pevcheskaya kapella
(Imperial Court Chapel), began to study composition under Galuppi while still a choirboy. He later continued his studies with
Galuppi in Venice, and after his return to Russia, eventually became the first native-born musician to be appointed director
of the Kapella. In this capacity, he retained a monopoly on all sacred music publication: his chant harmonisations were
intended to standardise church practice across the empire. Bortniansky also composed multiple settings of liturgical texts.
The Cherubic Hymn heard on this recording is one of nine and was reputedly Peter Tchaikovsky’s favourite of Bortniansky’s
settings. Tchaikovsky, in his own edition of Bortniansky’s sacred music published in the 1880s, also wrote that he considered
Bortniansky’s Choral Concerto No. 32 ‘the best of all thirty-five’.

As a genre, the sacred choral concerto has no precise equivalent in the West. Musically, its multi-movement structure and
fluid alternation of solo and tutti forces most closely resembles the concerto grosso. In terms of its function, the choral
concerto typically is performed during the Divine Liturgy when the clergy disappears behind the iconostasis to consecrate
the Eucharist and to take communion. Thus at the very moment when there is no visual procession or splendour for the
congregants to behold, the music – the choral concerto – becomes the focal point of the service. Composing some thirty-five
dukhovny khorovy kontserty for four-voice choir and ten for double choir, Bortniansky is credited with developing this genre
to its highest form.

Like Bortniansky, Artemy Vedel was born in Hlukhiv, Ukraine. Vedel, however, studied and composed solely in Kiev and
Kharkiv. His music, less Italianate in style, sounds more idiosyncratic in form and harmonic contour to the Western ear and
perhaps retains a greater degree of Slavic melancholy. Declared mentally ill (as some believe, for political reasons), Vedel was
committed to prison where he died, never achieving the eminence of Bortniansky. – M. C. K.

Having crafted a career marked by public showmanship at the highest level – by pianism whose virtuosity was second to none,
by compositions whose rhetoric was extroverted and extravagant, by a conducting style whose impassioned conviction won
wide acclaim from concertgoers and critics alike – Sergei Rachmaninoff


of the Russian Orthodox Church’s most sacred rites whose spiritual essence dates back to Byzantium.

Building on the techniques of the earlier Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, op.31, and richly scored for unaccompanied chorus,
the All-Night Vigil is a brilliant achievement. In contrast to the gregarious nature of his best-known works – the Second
Symphony, the Second and Third Piano Concertos, the Paganini Rhapsody – the Vigil looks inward. Instead of flirting with
advanced harmonic languages, it is inspired by and infused with centuries of Russian chant. Rachmaninoff was mostly tone-
deaf to modernity and his compositions were more strongly drawn back to nineteenth-century patterns than pulled forward
by twentieth-century practices. Although the musical universe was changing around him, he had no ear for the ‘Luft von
anderen Planeten’ so famously augured in Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, premiered in 1908. In the All-Night
Vigil he declared ancient allegiances.

And more than the musical world was changing in the years before the Vigil, which was composed and premiered in 1915.
On the international front, the First World War was all-consuming. Since its outbreak in 1914, Russia, on the Allies’ behalf,
was committed to securing the Eastern Front, an initiative whose successes were decidedly mixed. (The disastrous opening
gambit of this campaign is the subject of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic novel August 1914.) And on the domestic front,
internal politics created further turmoil. Despite earnest efforts begun in the wake of the ‘first’ Russian Revolution of 1905,
Tsar Nicholas II’s introduction of democratic reforms was imperfect, so imperfect that in 1917 the Russian Revolution would
sweep away the remains of Imperial Russia.

Upheaval, in fact, is what diverted Rachmaninoff’s career from composition to performance. He recently had created some
of his finest works – his Third Piano Concerto in 1909; The Bells and the Second Piano Sonata in 1913 – but in 1914 his
primary activity was performing, not composing; to support Russia’s efforts in the so-called ‘Great War,’ he toured towns along
the Volga with Serge Koussevitzky and his orchestra. In fact, Rachmaninoff was possibly led by chaos to the contemplation
and creation of the Vigil. Although during these years he was in his prime as virtuoso composer and performer, ‘the spiritual
beauty of the [Vigil] . . . invites interpretation as an oblique response to the sacrifices of the war years’ (so speculates music
historian Glenn Watkins in Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002,
p.302).

Rachmaninoff was by no means conventionally religious; never a conscientious churchgoer, he stopped going altogether after
marrying his first cousin, Natalia Satina, a marriage proscribed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Yet prior to composing the
Vigil, he was schooled in ancient chant by Stepan Smolensky, the leading expert on the subject of his day and Director of
Moscow’s Synodal School of Church Music (and the dedicatee of the Vigil). In the work, Rachmaninoff drew on three different
traditions: znamenny chant, the oldest school, which traced its roots to Byzantium but by the late nineteenth century had
fallen out of favour; a more recitational ‘Greek’ chant, which was developed in Moscow in the seventeenth century (no.12);
and ‘Kiev’ chant, also a seventeenth-century development, which adapted znamenny chants to reflect Ukrainian tastes for an
alternation of recitation and choral refrains (nos.14 and 15).

When listening to the Vigil, one always is conscious of its liturgical elements, but one is also aware, as Orlando Figes has
suggested, of a strong feeling of folk music and of how one genre accommodates the other. Both share melodies that are
simply constructed and that generally move in stepwise motion; both are rich in sonorous intervals of the third and the sixth;
and both express feelings, be they sacred or secular, of a plain and pious people. They are the art-song’s antithesis.

Yet the Vigil is abundant in artful touches. Working with the sumptuous palette of an unaccompanied four-voice chorus,
Rachmaninoff is endlessly inventive in creating a wide spectrum of textures and sonorities. The work reflects a Russian


never rises higher than the note A above the stave, but they find prominence most notably in no.16, one of the movements
wholly the composer’s own; paired with tenors in unison, they sing an arching melody tinged with longing and nostalgia (bars
15ff) – it is the most idiomatic touch in the entire work of what we think of as vintage Rachmaninoff, as typified by the lyric
tenderness of the Second Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony. The Vigil’s high-voice solos are mostly entrusted to the
tenors. And the basses, as we might expect, are richly exploited, nowhere more so than at the conclusion of the Nunc dimittis
(no.15), where they notably descend to the lowest of possible low B flats.

Rhythmically, the Vigil reflects the prosody of its texts. The words’ flow and accentuations are mirrored in the music and this
creates a wonderful plasticity. Listen, for instance, to the supple and fluid rhythmic pulse in no.2, bars 14ff, where the dynamic
propulsion of the words carries the narrative irresistibly forward, rendering bar-lines irrelevant.

Rachmaninoff composed the All-Night Vigil in less than a fortnight early in 1915. He quickly sought approbation from Sergei
Taneyev, his former professor at the Moscow Conservatory, and Taneyev applauded the work – his praise was ‘warmer than
ever’ – which surely was a great satisfaction (Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, p.192).

The Vigil also was shown to Alexander Kastalsky and Nicolai Danilin, director and conductor, respectively, of the Moscow
Synodal School and Choir, and they, too, were fulsome in their praise. Kastalsky, in fact, agreed to sponsor its first performance
with Danilin conducting. This took place in March 1915, to benefit the war-relief effort, and according to Sergei Bertensson,
Rachmaninoff’s biographer, the premiere gave the composer ‘ “an hour of the most complete satisfaction”, so magnificent
were the choir singers. Audience, musicians, and critics were enthusiastic; even Grigori Prokofiev, often Rachmaninov’s
harshest critic, wrote that it was a great step forward … and remarked that “its miracle is in its fusion of the simple and
the sincere” ’ (Bertensson, p. 191). The work was so successful that it received an additional five performances within a
month. – G. G.