Rachmaninov: Liturgy of St John Chrysostom

A few lines to welcome the follow-up to EMI’s highly successful set of the Rachmaninov Vespers made in King’s College, Cambridge. If you don’t mind trading weight of sonority and adult female voices for perfect tuning and somewhat chaste manners, and on the whole I don’t, this is for you. Stephen Johns’ production provides plenty of impact while creating a strong sense of the building.

About the work and performers

Rachmaninov completed the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, his setting of the Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy for unaccompanied chorus, in 1910, several years before the All-Night Vigil (Vespers) with which it’s often paired in the wider Rachmaninov discography, and with which it shares the same rich, low-voiced choral writing rooted in Znamenny chant and the broader Russian Orthodox liturgical tradition. Stephen Cleobury directed the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge from 1982 to 2019, building the choir’s reputation as one of the pre-eminent English cathedral-style choirs on record across a huge range of repertoire well beyond its core Anglican tradition, of which this Rachmaninov disc, following the same forces’ earlier recording of the composer’s Vespers, is one distinctive example.

Rachmaninov’s most celebrated choral achievement remains the All-Night Vigil of 1915, dedicated to the memory of Stepan Smolensky, the choral scholar who first introduced him to the old Znamenny chant tradition both works draw on; its fifth movement, the Nunc dimittis, was the piece Rachmaninov himself asked to have sung at his own funeral. The Liturgy heard on this disc predates the Vigil by five years and is built for the different, more compact liturgical function of the Divine Liturgy itself rather than the Vigil service, a distinction any listener coming to Rachmaninov’s sacred music for the first time through the Vespers is likely to notice immediately in the shorter, more tightly focused movements here.