At church, with Rachmaninoff
Kappella Kyrie will perform All-Night Vigil at two services
Sergei Rachmaninoff wasn’t an avid churchgoer, but the Russian Orthodoxy of his youth accompanied him his entire life.
Over a two-week period in 1915, Rachmaninoff composed an unaccompanied choral piece in Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church.
A century later, All-Night Vigil is a Rachmaninoff staple, regularly excerpted and performed. It remained one of the composer’s personal favourites, sung at his 1943 funeral in southern California, far from the Soviet Union, where it was banned for its religious content in the years following its composition.
As far as Melanie Turgeon can figure, no choir in North America has ever used it for its simplest, most obvious purpose: a church service.
“Most often you just see people perform the piece, movement after movement, as a concert,” says Turgeon, director of the Kappella Kyrie Slavic Chamber Choir. “I thought we should do something different.”
On June 6 and 13, the Kappella Kyrie choir will sing all 15 movements at a pair of services, interspersed with chants.
Like Rachmaninoff, Turgeon has deep roots in Eastern Christianity, an esthetic and theological tradition that evokes the divine through the senses, through iconography and architecture, candles and incense, chants and choruses.
Turgeon grew up at one of Edmonton’s Ukrainian Catholic jewels, St. Josaphat Cathedral on 97th Street, deeply influenced by the music, liturgy and history of the east. After finishing bachelor and master’s degrees in music at the University of Alberta, she moved to Illinois to complete a doctorate in choral conducting. In 2002 she returned to Edmonton, where she began teaching at King’s University and, because of an illness, stepped in as music director at St. Josaphat’s. She’s been doing both jobs ever since.
As a doctoral student, Turgeon performed the piece, relishing the idea of one day conducting Rachmaninoff’s vigil herself. It was back of mind five years ago, when she formed the Kappella Kyrie, a choir specializing in Slavic and eastern choral music, much of it from the tradition of Eastern Christianity.
Kappella Kyrie is a healthy mix of Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians, liberally seasoned with Turgeon’s former students at King’s. The group performs the Slavic sacred music that Turgeon researches at King’s, pieces too complicated for a voluntary church choir. For the non-Slavics, texts are often transliterated.
The All-Night Vigil was on their bucket list, and since the choir’s fifth anniversary coincided with the 100th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s centenary, it seemed perfect. Local churches jumped aboard.
Since the All-Night Vigil will be a church service, it’s not a concert or performance. There will be no intermission, no ticket boxes. The service should take about two and a half hours, so despite the title, a sleeping bag and toothbrush won’t be necessary.
Bringing the vigil back to church took some adjustments. Rachmaninoff’s piece has built-in gaps — known as propers — filled with simple traditional chants based on the church calendar, with as much English as possible. Those portions will be sung with a single voice on an extended single note.
Other parts of the service will incorporate litanies from Rachmaninoff’s other liturgical piece, his divine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the main worship service of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
For those who wish to give back, a collection will be taken up to cover a few small expenses. All extra proceeds will go to orphanages in Ukraine, where both churches have close connections with people on the ground.
Turgeon isn’t sure whether Rachmaninoff intended the piece to be sung as a church service. But she thinks he’d like the idea of listeners experiencing his music in the setting of its inspiration, a memory he retained his entire life. Why else would he structure melodies from chants or keep the length roughly the same as a service?
“It’s hard to know precisely if he intended it merely for a concert piece or if he actually intended it to be performed within services. I think the latter,” she says. “It will be interesting, a kind of continuous movement of sound.”