Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil by Latvian Radio Choir

Rachmaninoff composed the All-Night Vigil in less than two weeks in January and February of 1915, and the work arrived at its premiere already bearing the weight of catastrophe — Russia at war, a civilization beginning its long unraveling. He drew on ancient chant melodies for most of the fifteen movements, and what he made of them feels less like composition than like memory, like something retrieved from a depth that has no bottom. That the work would become, in his own estimation, the piece he most wanted performed at his funeral says something about where he kept it in his heart.

The Latvian Radio Choir under Sigvards Klava gives us something genuinely lovely here. Make no mistake about that. The blend is warm, the intonation clean, the overall sound possessed of a dark velvet quality that suits the music’s nocturnal character. The unnamed choral soloists acquit themselves with real distinction — idiomatic, poised, never reaching for effect. Klava shapes phrases with evident care, and there are moments, particularly in the hushed pianissimos of “Blagoslovi, dushe moya, Gospoda,” where the choir seems to breathe as a single organism.

The question that haunts any non-Russian ensemble approaching this music isn’t really about linguistics — the Latvians’ Church Slavonic sounds convincing enough — it’s about a particular quality of vocal weight and emotional abandon that Russian choral culture produces almost involuntarily, the way certain soils produce certain wines. The St. Petersburg Chamber Choir under Nikolai Korniev, in their classic recording, understood this instinctively. Borodina’s solos on that album can sound, to ears trained on Western choral practice, extravagantly wobbly. But that wobble is part of the expressive vocabulary, inseparable from the weeping quality of the music itself. When the bass voices in the Korniev sink into their lowest registers — those famous Russian basses, who seem to descend past the human voice into something geological — the music does what Rachmaninoff designed it to do: it breaks you open.

The Latvians don’t break you open. They move you, genuinely, but from a respectful distance. Their basses are present and sufficient without being overwhelming; their dynamic range is wide but never alarming. The homogeneity of blend that Klava has achieved is, technically speaking, admirable — individual voices rarely surface from the choral texture, which is exactly right for this music. But homogeneity has its costs. The Vigil at its most shattering is not a homogeneous experience. It is raw, it is vast, it is excessive in the manner of the Russian nineteenth century generally — think of what Dostoevsky does with a paragraph.

The recorded sound is clean and warmly reverberant, placing the choir in what feels like a generously proportioned acoustic without pushing it into cathedral-scale wash.

Where does this leave us? Somewhere between admiration and mild frustration — which is, I suppose, an honest response to an honest interpretation. If you come to this music wanting to feel the floor drop out from under you, wanting the particular terror and consolation that Rachmaninoff built into these pages, Klava is probably not your director. But if you want a beautifully made, thoughtfully prepared account that will reward repeated late-evening listening without demanding your entire emotional reserves — this will serve you very well indeed. It’s a recording to live with, not necessarily to be changed by.