In a classical music world obsessive about anniversaries, be they grand or modest, the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of the Russian émigré composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has inevitably drawn discover. Just as inevitably, commemorations have tended to deal with his battle horses: the symphonies, piano concertos and solo piano works.
It appears to have fallen to Steven Fox and his glorious choirs to are likely to Rachmaninoff’s motley however treasurable physique of choral works. The sacred ones, notably — with their flowing but restrained lyricism and not one of the bombast or sentimentality typically related to the composer — characterize the perfect of Rachmaninoff.
On Wednesday, Fox, the inventive director of the New York-based Clarion Music Society, will return to his alma mater — Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. — to steer the Clarion Choir in Rachmaninoff’s beautiful All-Night Vigil, a pinnacle of the wealthy Russian Orthodox repertory. They will repeat the efficiency on Friday at Carnegie Hall.
Fox, 44, first carried out the work — generally known as the Vespers, after a liturgical service included in it — as a part of a senior undertaking at Dartmouth in 2000. He additionally dealt with the logistics — easy sufficient, you may suppose, as a result of Russian Orthodox follow bans musical devices, utilizing solely voices.
But these voices should be particular, combining virtuosity with clean mix. The basses, particularly, should journey comfortably and sonorously beneath the clef, and usually, skilled ringers are wanted to fill out an novice efficiency. (Clarion will function Glenn Miller, the present go-to American basso profundo, in its two performances.)
And besides, the textual content isn’t fairly in Russian however in antiquated Old Slavonic.
“I can’t say I knew precisely what I used to be doing at that time,” Fox mentioned in an interview. “There was some extent a few week earlier than the live performance after I felt overwhelmed. I bear in mind calling my adviser in tears and saying: ‘It’s an excessive amount of. I can’t preserve monitor of all the main points.’ But main as much as the efficiency, even throughout it, I simply felt calm. That actually was the second I found that I needed to pursue conducting as a career.”
Fox has since made specialties of Russian Orthodox music on the whole and Rachmaninoff particularly. He and Clarion have offered the Vespers typically at New Year in New York and recorded it fantastically for Pentatone.
The performances this week are only one a part of Fox’s yearlong celebration of the Rachmaninoff anniversary. At New Year, he led Clarion performances of the composer’s different nice sacred work, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. And in March, he carried out the Cathedral Choral Society, of which he’s music director, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in a stirring rendition of “The Bells,” Rachmaninoff’s tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, on the National Cathedral in Washington.
Still to return, in November, are the cantata “Spring” and “Three Russian Songs,” with Clarion at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, the place Fox lives.
Might Fox fear concerning the appropriateness of celebrating a son of Russia so deeply rooted in its tradition as Russia wages battle on Ukraine?
“I did have misgivings,” he mentioned. “My essential concern was singing liturgical music, given the church’s function in what is occurring now. But as I believed extra about Rachmaninoff’s story, I believed in a manner it pertains to what many Ukrainians are experiencing. He form of stored politics at arm’s size for an extended time, however on the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, he mentioned: ‘I’ve no alternative. I’ve to go away.’”
In the top, Clarion added a program notice for the New Year performances of the Liturgy: “There is a horrible battle happening within the a part of the world from which this lovely music comes. As we sing tonight, we pray for peace within the New Year.”
And Leonid Roschko, an Orthodox priest and a basso who sang the Deacon in these performances, added a prayer to the Liturgy: “That Thou mightest enlighten with the sunshine of Thy divine knowledge the minds of these darkened with hardness of coronary heart, and shield the folks of Ukraine from any hurt.”
On research and work travels to Russia earlier than the invasion, Fox honed one other specialty, Baroque music. He based Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg, which known as itself the nation’s first period-instrument orchestra. He additionally unearthed what he calls “the earliest recognized Russian symphony,” from about 1771, by the Ukraine-born Maksym Berezovsky.
Back in New York, Fox took the lead in reviving the Clarion Music Society, which had fallen idle shortly after the demise of its founder, Newell Jenkins, in 1996. Fox took it over in 2006 and, whereas increasing its vary and pushing it to new heights of virtuosity, he furthered his personal ventures into early music, notably together with that of Bach.
So when the New York Philharmonic requested him to cowl for Jaap van Zweden throughout a run of Bach’s towering “St. Matthew Passion” in March, he was wanting to do it. No matter that rehearsals have been to start the day after the “Bells” efficiency in Washington.
“I do know the piece, and it might have been onerous to say no,” Fox mentioned. “Jaap and I acquired on very properly. I admired his depth. I believed he knew the rating rather well, and but each time I went again to his workplace, he was finding out it extra, getting ready.”
Van Zweden reciprocated the sentiment: “Steven Fox comes from the identical college of deciphering Bach that I do,” he mentioned in an electronic mail. “His glorious ears and good concepts have been an actual asset. I’ve requested him again subsequent 12 months after we do the Mozart Requiem on the New York Philharmonic.”
And Fox continues to until Russian soil. Spurred by the famend music writer Vladimir Morosan, Fox has been exploring music by Alexander Kastalsky. For Naxos, he recorded “Memory Eternal to the Fallen Heroes” with Clarion, and ready Clarion and the Cathedral Choral Society to participate in Leonard Slatkin’s recording of an growth of that work, “Requiem for Fallen Brothers,” with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
Morosan has described Kastalsky as “a seminal determine upon the panorama” of the early twentieth century. Yet he stays so obscure within the West that he didn’t even register within the 2001 version of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. What different rarities may Fox and Morosan unearth?
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