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| Maestro Yuval Benozer (ivocal.co.il) |
The all-night vigil is a service of the
Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches, consisting of the combination
of Vespers and Matins within one service, the combination of these
two services bringing those attending the vigil from night into the day. In
ancient times, “vigil” referred to time spent on guard duty, or ‘keeping
watch’. In the Church, it means time spent in attentive preparation and "waiting
on God". Because of its great length, the all-night vigil is commonly
celebrated in monasteries. “All-Night Vigil" was the title of an
a-cappella concert of sacred music performed by the Israeli Vocal Ensemble,
conducted by its founder/music director Yuval Benozer. This writer attended the
event at St Andrew's Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem, on December 30th, 2024.
The program opened with Samuel Barber's
"Agnus Dei", the composer's 1967 transcription for 8-part choir of
his own "Adagio for Strings". Barber's "Adagio" has been
associated in the public imagination with elegiac mourning, nostalgia, love and
passion. In transcribing it for voices, using the “Lamb of God” text from the
Mass, Barber adds to the piece a dimension of spirituality, the Latin text of
the "Agnus Dei" splendidly meeting the melodic contours of the Adagio.
In their flowing, dignified reading of the work, the IVE singers propel the
rhapsodic section to a climax of scintillating choral timbres, this intensity
then falling away, creating an arch form, with the work concluding on a hushed
dominant chord.
English composer John Tavener's short carol
"The Lamb" (1982), a setting of the first section of William Blake’s
"Songs of Innocence and Experience" (1789), presents its own unique
challenges to conductor, performer and listener. Homophonic and homorhythmic,
it bears no time signature, adding extra bar lines at the end of stanzas to
create poignant endings. The music is built of a simple melodic idea, however,
using real inversion to create sharp dissonances between vocal parts,
explaining why the motet shifts between dissonant sections (as in the opening
duet of two sopranos) and those of lush, tender harmonies, then to add some
unison singing towards the end. Benozer and the 17 singers engaged in
precision, control and the subtle use of dynamics to create the piece's sense of mystery
and wonder, capturing the Christian notion of a small child ruling the universe
through love.
In 1881, Hugo Wolf composed the "Sechs
geistliche Lieder" (Sacred Songs) to texts of Joseph von Eichendorff, the poems dealing with death, farewell and resignation to God’s will. At about the time
Wolf was composing the work, his fiancée expressed her wish to break off their
engagement. Song No.2 "Einklang" (Agreement) may have been a
reference to his resulting heartbreak. Indeed, Wolf’s attitude towards religion
was ambiguous, leading one to surmise that the longing and loss present in
Wolf’s settings of these texts may have been of a nature more personal than spiritual. Displaying fine German enunciation and well-shaped, sensitive
performance, and drawing on their rich palette of dynamics, the IVE singers
conveyed Wolf's luxuriant Romantic harmonic language, his originality and
personal style of expression. One highlight was the ensemble's eloquent
rendition of "Ergebung" (Resignation), performed at Wolf’s own
funeral in 1903.
The program concluded with several
movements from Sergei Rachmaninov's "Vespers" (All-Night Vigil),
Op.37 (1915), (from which the concert takes its title). Rachmaninov dedicated
the work to the memory of Stepan Vasilevich Smolensky, who had introduced him
to sacred repertoire at the Moscow Conservatory. The
“Vespers” are based on traditional Orthodox chants, including some of the
ancient Znamenny chants as well as more recent Greek and Kievian chants.
Indeed, Rachmaninov keeps to the strict demands of the liturgical tradition,
those including a ban on musical instruments and the rhythmic supremacy of the
text. A masterpiece from a composer at the peak of his creative powers,
Rachmaninov's Op.37 is considered one of the most challenging pieces of the
a-cappella repertoire. It makes huge demands on singers’ intonation and breath
control, dictating a vivid spectrum of dynamic gradations and requiring
wholehearted engagement with the texts. The score only offers sparse tempo
directions, Rachmaninov having assumed that his performers would be familiar
with the manner in which its various liturgical hymns were traditionally sung.
To complicate matters more, the language sung is not conversational Russian but
Church Slavonic, the liturgical language for all non-Greek churches in the
Orthodox tradition. From the ardent, festive utterance of the opening chorus,
Benozer and his singers give fine expression to the work's content - its
praise, meditation, penitence and its final proclamation - the choir sounding
warm and richly-toned in the (sometimes overly) generous resonance of the
Scottish Church. Throughout, via Rachmaninov's wonderfully strange blending of
melodic- and harmonic elements, the IVE's singing glows with a strong
sense of cumulative drama and with an awestruck quality, as, for example, in
the lush dynamic blooming and the exultant "Alleluias" of
"Blessed is the Man" (No.3). The ensemble, relatively small but well
balanced, has an excellent complement of low basses. Few as they are, the basses meet
the requirement of singing at "subterranean" depths, so natural to
their Russian counterparts, infusing the choral sound with the mellow, dark,
well-grounded richness, an integral element of an Orthodox choir. In the palpable joy of "Blessed Art Thou, O Lord" (Nr. 8), a Znamenny chant carrying a
number of drones, Daniel Portnoy gave an impressive
performance of the tenor solo.
