Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff calculated his Vespers himself among his best works, and the way the Cappella Amsterdam choir sings them this week makes you understand why: the music sounds glowing, flowing and three-dimensional. Wonderful harmonies fill the space like a warm, woolen blanket wrapped around you from all sides. Especially when the acoustics are nice, like on Friday evening in the Kampense Broederkerk.
The name by which this beloved choral work is known has been translated somewhat unfortunately: the vespers, Catholic and Orthodox evening prayers, form only part of the whole piece. They are followed by eight matins (prayers for the early morning) and a final part of the prime, which belongs to the dawn. Together they last about an hour, and form a wake, or vigil.
For the fifteen-part a capella work, Rachmaninoff took the melodies of eleven monophonic Russian Orthodox church chants (he invented the rest himself) and composed romantic harmonies with up to eleven different voice groups. Conductor Daniel Reuss makes all of this spatially audible. When, after the climax of the moving ‘Bogoroditse Devo’ (‘Ave Maria’), the altos pick up the melody and break away from the rest.
‘Nyne otpushchayeshi’ (‘Now let me go’) also has such a translucent sound at Cappella, in which the swaying high voices and the extremely low bass contrast heaven and earth. This fifth part is the Biblical song of old Simeon, who can die peacefully after seeing the newborn Jesus in the temple. Rachmaninoff wanted to play this music at his own funeral. You hear how the tenor solo is slowly buried by a descending motif in the basses, ending on a low B flat – one of the lowest notes in choral literature.
Tap open and closed
With sometimes surprisingly sparse hand gestures, Daniel Reuss manages to get a gigantic volume out of his 32-person choir. The pianissimos could have been a bit softer, but the build-up in dynamics is impressive. Getting louder and softer again on the word Slava! (‘Honor [aan god]’) in part seven runs so smoothly that it seems as if Reuss is turning on and off a tap.
That wide volume range makes you Rachmaninoffs Vespers (or better yet: Vigil for the whole night) must be heard live. That seems obvious – what music wouldn’t be nicer to listen to live? – but on CD the Vespers even sound almost unpleasant. Loud quickly becomes shouty. Crescendos are sometimes deafening and the solos shrill. But live at Cappella Amsterdam, the solos of Dorien Lievers (deep, beautifully dark alto) and Martin Logar (bright tenor) are well integrated into the flowing choral sound. The cheerful alleluias of ‘Khvalite imya Gospodne’ (praise the name of the Lord) suddenly start ringing around you like real church bells in the two-aisled Broederkerk. You can feel the vibration of the bass.
And then the breathtaking harmonies that Rachmaninoff prescribes: Cappella Amsterdam always sings them with such a warm and transparent timbre that you wish they would actually last a whole night.