Confession: I've always kinda hated the Rachmaninov Vespers... until today.
One at a time, the Vespers are a magnificent experience. They're so beautiful, so spiritually deep, but they all sound the same... One chorus of Godiva chocolate after another, until they all blur into a pool of generic, monotonous beauty, like angels floating around a church.
Rachmaninov may sometimes wear on ears like mine, but the Vespers's beautiful reflection pool is so unlike the musical personality we know so well. Rachmaninov's piano playing is tightly coiled, cast in bronze, so rhythmic, so dynamic, so solid. Richter called him 'an oak.' Rachmaninov the composer is a born architect, always terracing every moment of a piece so that we know exactly where are its peaks and valleys. There's a story of the young Rachmaninov conducting Mozart 40. Everybody was used to hearing Mozart 40 in Dresden Doll dress: slow tempi, legato phrases, monodynamic gentleness. Rachmaninov apparently intuited the modern way with faster tempi, full dynamic contrasts. It came upon the Russian audience like a revelation.
Today I heard Vladimir Spivakov conduct the Vespers and my view of it completely changed. Spivakov is a violinist first, conductor second, and choral conductor tenth... He clearly has a unique perspective on a work lead by every choral conductor in the world, most of whom have their paint-by-number interpretation, no different than anyone else's.
This Rachmaninov dances, it has percussion and angles. This is the country of the Trepak and Troika, the Barnynya, the Kamarinskaya and the Kalinka. There is plenty of spiritual beauty to offer the Lord, but here is also beauty of the earth. This is the oaken Rachmaninov of our memories.
Compare this performance to a performance like Robert Shaw. Shaw's singers are so exquisite, so beautifully matched to the church's echo. Shaw conducts like the brilliant choral conductor he is, with blend, intonation, diction, matched so euphoniously that it attains a kind of perfection.
The only problem is that Rachmaninov is not a choral composer. He is an instrumental composer who made but two major ventures into the choral world and otherwise returned to the piano and orchestra. What shape does this music have in most performances? In most Vespers performances, the formlessness coagulates like a luminescent amoeba.
This Rachmaninov has imperfect intonation. It also has spine, it has development, it has a plot and expresses something more specific than merely the ineffable. Dostoevsky was as much a creature of the Russian earth as of the Orthodox heaven. Why should Rachmaninov not be the same?
Spivakov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9ylzdggQzk
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