Hi Kal,
As it happens, I have both these SACDs. I’ve enjoyed reading your articles on multichannel reproduction in Stereophile. I do enjoy listening to SACD discs on my home theater in surround sound. Even using a relatively inexpensive Marantz AV8801 and Marantz multichannel amplifier, they sound quite nice. The added channels generate a richer ambience. Some of my Mahler SFO SACDs that I don’t like in 2 channel mode sound much nicer in multichannel. I don’t buy SACD discs that often any more, but here’s one I recently bought that I enjoy hearing. It’s engineered by Keith Johnson. The Gloria Dei Cantores is a choir from Cape Cod. Many of their other recordings on Qobuz are really lovely.
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Love Rachmaninoff, I remember reading him described as the musician’s trifecta and a triple threat.. a master composer, conductor, pianist… what a giant and I also really like his a capella all night vigil. Typical Rachmaninoff in that it is technically challenging but it also reveals a more deeply spiritual dimension to the composer.
A more convincing performance for me here is Paul Hillier leading the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir on Harmonia Mundi… still a great recording but a bit more impassioned Rachmaninoff in spirit.
I’ll admit I’m not a fan of Keith Johnson’s Reference Recordings which tend to be a celebration of hifi sound but not often among the better music performances available. By comparison Harmonia Mundi as a label reliably gets the recordings right but also seems (and more importantly for me) is often a better curator of performance.
Also highly recommendable (but definitely less overtly hifi or audiophile-like perhaps a recording) but a more severe and intense and more purely Russian sourced performance is the 1965 Alexander Sveshnikov Rachmaninov Vespers with the State Academic Russian Choir originally on Melodiya. Sveshnikov and his Russian crew extract a dark matter kind of soulfulness in a raw and deeply passionate performance.
With Sveshnikov the emotional intensity is a greater driver of the sound and passion seems to play a greater part to the other more nicely etheric and perhaps more constrained responses. Passion and power seems to me to be a more Rachmaninoff thing.
I’d suggest we can learn a lot about Rachmaninoff from precedents in performance from those of the Russian school and especially from those who knew Rachmaninoff well just like we learn when listening to Vladimir Horowitz and his takes on the Rach 3.
But then again the thing with streaming is it’s easy to compare. If we just have hard copy libraries it’s more likely we’d not be able to easily or affordably explore for whatever is best whether our priority is more in the recording or more in the performance as so often we can’t have the ideal of both.
For those wanting a bit more on Sergei Rachmaninoff and his Vigil below is from an article written by Debra Lew Harder garnered from the interweb…
Debra's last day on the air at WRTI was September 21st, 2021. She's now the radio host for The Metropolitan Opera. Read more here.
www.wrti.org
Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1899
Library Of Congress/Corbis/VCG Via Getty Images
As a boy, Sergei Rachmaninoff often visited his grandmother’s house in the country, where he was mesmerized by the sound of church bells. And although he claimed he was not a religious man, the pianist and composer was influenced by that memory—the music and the bells of the Russian Orthodox Church gave him inspiration for one of his greatest works, his “All-Night Vigil” for
à capella choir.
In the Russian Orthodox church, the all-night vigil is an actual part of the Russian (or Eastern) Orthodox liturgy. It traditionally precedes Sunday worship or important church feast days, and consists of three sections: Vespers (the evening prayer), Matins (prayer that takes place from 3 to 5 AM), and First Hour (the first prayer at dawn).
This is an extensive, lengthy service, involving many psalms, litanies, and, most strikingly, chants that have been sung since antiquity, originating in the Byzantine Empire.
Rachmaninoff composed his version of the all-night vigil in 1915, after his Second and Third Piano Concertos and the Second Symphony had brought him international recognition. Rachmaninoff's “All-Night Vigil” consists of 15 movements, nine of which are based on traditional Eastern Orthodox church chants that come from Greece, Kiev, and Russia.
Six of the movements are Rachmaninoff’s own invention, using motifs typical of Eastern Orthodox melodies. The dramatic high point of the work is the ninth number,
Blagosloven esi, Gospodi (Blessed is the Lord,) which tells the story of the Resurrection. Rachmaninoff fans will recognize this chant as one he used in the exciting last movement of his final orchestral work, “Symphonic Dances,” written for The Philadelphia Orchestra.
A few short years after he composed “All-Night Vigil,” Rachmaninoff, in his 40s, was forced to flee Russia with his wife and daughters, at the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution. He had to reinvent himself, and decided to earn a living as a touring virtuoso pianist. Despite the fame and fortune he eventually earned, Rachmaninoff remained homesick for the Russia of his youth, from which he was forever exiled.
It is perhaps not a surprise that the sounds of his childhood, and of the Russian Orthodox Church reminded him of his homeland. He said that “All-Night Vigil,” along with his choral symphonic work “The Bells,” were his two favorite compositions. He asked that the 5th movement of “All-night Vigil,”
Nunc dimittis, be sung at his own funeral.
