Levine: Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom – Tenebrae

A grave outside Moscow, wildflowers maybe still damp from rain, and a composer standing there feeling the pull of something larger than grief. That is how Alexander Levine tells it, anyway — the story of how a visit to the resting place of Fr. Alexander Men, murdered with an axe in 1990 for the crime of preaching an open, humane Christianity in a country that had forgotten what that meant, set him on the road to writing a complete setting of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. I believe him. You can hear the visitation in the music itself, which never behaves like a scholarly exercise in reconstructing Znamenny chant or Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, op. 37, though both ancestors hover somewhere in the harmonic DNA.

The Chrysostom liturgy is the workhorse Eucharistic rite of Eastern Orthodoxy, sung most days of the year, a fifth-century inheritance that every Russian composer from Tchaikovsky onward has had a crack at setting. Tchaikovsky’s own op. 41 version got him in hot water with the Holy Synod, who did not appreciate a secular composer trespassing on liturgical turf. Levine, decades later and in a wholly different Russia, faces no such institutional suspicion. If anything he had Valery Gergiev in his corner — the score reached Gergiev in 2007, and the Mariinsky Opera Chorus performed it at four consecutive Easter Festivals starting in 2008.

Tenebrae, under Nigel Short, give the piece its recorded premiere here, and they bring to it the same qualities I admired in their account of Levine’s earlier Prayers for Mankind, a 2007–08 cycle setting Fr. Men’s own texts. Blend. Unanimity of vowel. An almost frightening control of dynamic terracing — the choir can thin a chord down to a single hairline of sound and then rebuild it without any audible seam.

The liturgy unfolds in twenty-two movements, most just three to five minutes, the longest barely over six. Levine isn’t interested in symphonic argument here; he’s interested in ritual time, the way liturgical music exists to serve an action rather than develop an idea. And yet within these compressed spans he keeps surprising you.

Take the very opening exchange: the deacon’s incantation, then the choir’s response, “Amin.” Tradition wants two solid, sonorous block chords — the sound Rachmaninoff and Grechaninov both reached for instinctively, because it says finality, says amen means amen. Levine instead lets the word drift. Voices peel off into overlapping melodic strands, a kind of heterophonic haze, before the two chords finally arrive and the harmony locks into place. It’s a small moment. It tells you everything about his method — respect the shape of the tradition, but don’t be a slave to its gestures.

He has said as much himself, describing how he came to perceive the ethical content of the liturgy as something requiring a musical language wider than pure Znamenny austerity could offer. His note mentions influences well outside the Orthodox choral mainstream, and you can hear it: passages where the chromatic language tilts toward something closer to late Britten or even Pärt’s tintinnabuli manner, though Levine’s harmonic palette is warmer, less ascetic than Pärt’s, closer to the sound-world of Kastalsky or early Sviridov.

Does it all work? Mostly. A few of the shorter movements feel like transitions rather than destinations — functional rather than fully achieved, though given the liturgical purpose that may be exactly the point. The longer movements are where Levine’s imagination really catches fire, where the choral texture thickens into eight and ten real parts and Short’s singers navigate the polyphony with an ease that never sounds effortful, never sounds like Anglican choristers doing their best impression of a Slavic sound — a trap plenty of British ensembles fall into when they attempt this repertoire.

Recorded sound is close, warm, cathedral-ish without being murky. You get the bloom of a resonant space without losing the choir’s internal balances, no small feat in music this dependent on inner voicing.

Is there a rival version? Not really, not yet. This is the piece’s first outing on disc, and the Mariinsky performances, whatever their power, never made it to a commercial release I know of. For now Tenebrae own this repertoire, and they own it persuasively. I finished the disc thinking of that grave outside Moscow again, and of how rarely contemporary sacred music manages to sound like an actual act of devotion rather than a demonstration of mastery. Levine has pulled off the rarer thing. Recommended, unreservedly, to anyone who thought this repertoire had said all it had to say.