Houston Chamber Choir stays up ‘All Night’ with Rachmaninoff

Houston Chamber Choir’s performances of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “All Night Vigil” this weekend have been a long time coming.

“This was the piece that we were preparing in 2020, when the world closed down,” says Bob Simpson, the choir’s founder and artistic director. “So as it became possible for me to think about in-person concerts again this season, there was one thing that we knew we were going to do, and that was to pick up where we’d left off with the Rachmaninoff.”

This time the choir will move from its usual home of South Main Baptist Church to Bates Recital Hall inside Rice University’s Alice Pratt Brown Hall, which Simpson describes as the ideal venue for a performing a work of this nature: a cappella, devotional, reflective, celebratory.

“The acoustical properties of that room are spectacular,” he says. “They have curtains that can be lowered and raised to either dampen the acoustics or make them more live. We will have them up; the sound will bounce around.

“It’s also an intimate setting, and so people will feel that we're singing just to them,” adds Simpson. “It really is one of a kind, in my estimation.”

In “All Night Vigil,” Rachmaninoff combined nine traditional chants of the Russian Orthodox worship service with six more of his own creation he dubbed “conscious counterfeits.” Although Western-influenced 18th-century composers such as Dmitri Bortniansky helped lay the groundwork for Russian sacred choral music, its heyday did not begin until the 1880s with works by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as less well-known (to modern Americans) names such as Alexander Gretchaninov and Viktor Kalinnikov.

Along with his “The Bells,” a setting of the Edgar Allan Poe poem of the same name, “All Night Vigil” is often cited as one of the finest examples of the form.

“The overall choral profile is one of magnificent rich bass that slopes up like a pyramid to the sopranos at the top, each voice part getting inspired by the bass,” Simpson explains. “It’s an upward percolation of sound from the basses through the tenors, the altos, and sopranos.”

The work premiered in March 1915, at a concert helping with World War I relief efforts. But then as now, world events tended to intrude. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 effectively killed the tradition of sacred Russian choral music, as Rachmaninoff and many composers like him sought refuge in the West, in his case the United States. With Russian culture under the microscope in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s February invasion of Ukraine — as seen in the widespread condemnation of state-supported institutions such as the Bolshoi ballet — Simpson emphasizes that “All Night Vigil” exists in a much different context.

“This piece comes from a different time, out of a different genesis, and so I think it would be unfair to have what's happening now affect our approach to this piece,” he says. “It is a piece that I'm very, very, very proud to be able to do.”

More Information

'All Night Vigil'

When: 7:30 p.m. Apr. 23; 3:30 p.m. Apr. 24

Where: Bates Recital Hall, Rice University, 6100 Main St.

Details: $25; 713-224-5566; houstonchamberchoir.org

He hopes this weekend’s audience will embrace the healing properties of Rachmaninoff’s work. “I think as with any other piece of great sacred music, people will be provided with an opportunity to open their hearts and to feel the expression of deep faith,” Simpson says.

“In this particular case, given that it's an Orthodox tradition, some of the words will not be as familiar as if we were singing a mass,” he continues, “but the same quality of devotion that is contained in the [Bach] B minor Mass or in the Mozart Requiem is found in this: a sense of really eternal truths and a profound expression of those truths.”

Finally, performing “All Night Vigil” at last also gives Simpson’s choir a feeling of closure after two trying years.

“This is a piece that we have done twice before, but it's been many, many years since we did it, and the opportunity to come back to it — having had the disappointment of stopping in the middle of our preparations, and now come back to it — has a wonderful feeling of fulfillment,” he says. “We’re extraordinarily excited by this opportunity, and we’re eager to offer this to Houston.”

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.