Rachmaninoff Vespers rare treat

Lawrence Ewashko and the Cantata Singers brought a rare gem to the Blessed Sacrament Church in the Glebe Sunday night--a seldom heard setting of Vespers by Rachmaninoff.

For the most part, the Vespers spin in a tightly woven ribbon of sound--the voices blending homogeneously -- not unlike modern minimalist music. But at frequent albeit irregular moments, Rachmaninoff suddenly shakes this ribbon in the air, sending the voices flying to the limits of their registers.

In this and other respects, the Vespers is not easy to sing, but the Cantata Singers acquitted themselves with aplomb. Ewashko has a native sense with this music, which in less accomplished hands would seem all too foreign. To us it seemed comfortably familiar, no small accomplishment given a Russian text of an hour's length.

Rachmaninoff's Vespers is a setting of the great sung texts to the All-Night Vigil service of the Eastern Orthodox Church. On high holy days, the ritual combines evening Vespers with morning service in a night of worship.

Western Christians find a remarkable double to their liturgy in these Eastern services -- settings of familiar Psalms, the great texts of the Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis, and the Gloria -- familiar words and sentiments, but set in an unfamiliar language.

The effect is stunning: It is as if one is in the comfort of one's home, but everything has been changed by a foreign hand -- the same furniture but rearranged, same wallpaper but of different colours, windows facing east instead of west, roses instead of daffodils on the piano, Tolstoy and Turgenev in lieu of Atwood and Davies in the bookshelf.

The Vespers sets 15 texts, largely with the full choir, but sprinkled regularly with solos (sung beautifully by alto Christina Finlay and tenor Robert Ryan).

Particularly noteworthy among these were two trope texts: one to Mary, in which passages in a largely soft dynamic were interspersed with massive earth-shaking crescendoes. The second, a lengthy Resurrection trope, Blagosloven yesi, Ghospodi (Blessed art Thou, O Lord), could have been taken from a late opera by Verdi--with a dramatic subtlety and a truly operatic refrain typical of the best of that master's stage works.

Above all, however, Rachmaninoff knew how to write for basses, Russian basses, which weave in and out of the texture regularly.

Seldom has this reviewer heard a work so rich in low resonances, and since among Ewashko's basses are some truly outstanding male instruments, splendid bass parts of this sort are seldom witnessed in Ottawa. Only in the Nunc Dimittis did Ewashko's basses flag, and there only briefly where the part seemed to fall off the bottom of audible sound.

The one reservation of the evening stems from the sheer amount of Russian ritual text, which no western listener, and presumably no western choir, can completely overcome.

The aura of strangeness will, I suspect, prevent its being done again here soon. More's the pity, since we could stand to hear a little of those basses again.