The Rachmaninov All-Night Vigil and the Western Choral Canon Posted Thu 5 March 2026
In the spring of 1993, I found myself working at Glasgow Mayfest, an international arts festival established a few years earlier to provide a focus for the city’s renewed self-confidence as a dynamic city of culture. Encompassing the full range of artistic and performance endeavour, the classical music programme was always among the highlights of the annual cultural jamboree. In 1993, with the then General Manager, William Kelly, we programmed what for many would become one of the most memorable concerts in Mayfest’s history: the Glinka State Choir of St Petersburg performing Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil at St Aloysius’ Church in Garnethill.
Having loved classical and choral music from an early age, I knew this would be something special – particularly from a choir so steeped in the Russian liturgical tradition. But like many in the audience that night, I was not quite prepared for the profound experience it turned out to be. The evening offered one of those rare performances that changes the way you listen – not just to choral music, but to music itself. By the closing bars, the vast space of St Aloysius was utterly still in a way that had nothing to do with conventional concert politesse. Something had happened beneath the baroque revival vaults of St Aloysius, something difficult to put into words even now. It was a performance that set me thinking: how could this work, so remote in origin, so rooted in a liturgical tradition most of us knew little if anything about – have reached across every conceivable cultural distance and left us all, for a few quiet moments at least, in reverent awe. The question of how Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil came to occupy such a singular position in the western choral imagination has stayed with me through the intervening years.
That question is easier to ask than to answer, for the All-Night Vigil is in many ways a work that should never have travelled at all. There are pieces that belong so completely to their own tradition that they seem untranslatable – and then there is Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, Op. 37, a piece rooted so deeply in the soil of Russian Orthodox liturgy that it might never have found a home in the concert halls of the West. And yet it did. Composed in just two weeks in the winter of 1915, the Vespers – as it is commonly if imprecisely known – has become one of the most performed and recorded large-scale choral works of the twentieth century, sung by ensembles that have no connection whatsoever to the tradition that gave it life. Its presence in the western choral canon is, when you think about it, a small miracle.
The work draws almost entirely on two ancient bodies of melody: the ‘znamenny’ chant of the Russian Orthodox Church, a monophonic tradition dating back to the eleventh century, and the more recent Kievan chant. Rachmaninoff was not the first composer to harmonise these melodies – the practice had a distinguished precedent in figures like Bortniansky and Kastalsky – but he was perhaps the first to do so with such symphonic ambition. His voicings are lush in the Romantic manner, yet the melodic lines retain their ancient, modal quality, their long unhurried phrases resisting the pull of conventional harmonic resolution.
The result is music that sounds like nothing else: neither purely medieval nor purely Romantic, but suspended somewhere between the two.
What makes the All-Night Vigil so compelling to western choral culture is partly this strangeness. In the decades after the Second World War, as choral conductors searched for repertoire beyond the Austro-German mainstream – beyond Bach cantatas and Brahms motets – the work arrived like a revelation. Robert Shaw’s landmark recordings brought it to American audiences in the 1970s and 1980s, and conductors like Helmuth Rilling and Gennady Rozhdestvensky helped cement its international standing. The piece offered something that felt genuinely other: a sound world of deep basses, shimmering divisi sopranos, and a harmonic language that was modal and chromatic at once. For choirs accustomed to the clarity of German counterpoint, it was a kind of intoxication.
Its place in the canon is also inseparable from the particular demands it places on singers. The All-Night Vigil requires an extraordinary range of vocal colour, from the subterranean basso profundo solos – Rachmaninov famously insisted that the fifth movement, “Господи, ныне отпущаеши” (“Lord, Now Lettest Thou”), could not be adequately performed without a true Russian bass – to the ethereal high pianissimo of the soprano sections. The a cappella writing tests intonation mercilessly, and the work’s emotional arc, moving through lamentation, supplication, and quiet radiance, demands as much interpretive sensitivity as technical precision. These challenges have made it a kind of benchmark, a work that serious choral ensembles feel obliged to take on, much as orchestras feel obliged to perform Beethoven symphonies.
At the same time, the ‘All-Night Vigil’ canonical status sits a little uneasily with its origins. The work is a liturgical setting, intended to accompany an actual religious service of many hours’ duration; to perform it in a concert hall, stripped of its ritual context, is inevitably to transform it into something other than what Rachmaninov wrote. Western performances typically present it as a unified concert work, which it is and isn’t – the fifteen movements are liturgically sequenced but musically self-contained, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts only in a sense that is partly devotional. Yet this tension has perhaps enriched rather than diminished its appeal. There is a quality of the numinous in the best performances, a sense that the music is reaching toward something beyond its own sound, and that quality does not require the listener to be Orthodox, or Christian, or even religious, to feel.
If the western choral canon is understood not as a fixed list but as a living conversation about what choral music can be and do, then the All-Night Vigil earns its place there not by assimilation but by resistance. It has not been absorbed into a dominant tradition so much as it has quietly expanded what that tradition includes. Every ensemble that takes it on must grapple with its foreignness – the unfamiliar melodic idiom, the liturgical weight, the vocal demands that presuppose a culture of singing quite different from the European conservatory. In this sense the work is a standing argument against the insularity of canons, a reminder that the most enduring music often comes from places the mainstream did not think to look.
Nearly a century after its premiere, Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil continues to sound like a prayer addressed to no particular denomination - only, as the composer hoped, to the soul.
This weekend, the RSNO Chorus under its Director Stephen Doughty, performs the All-Night Vigil at Greyfriars Kirk and St Aloysius’ Church – that same Garnethill church where the Glinka State Choir transfixed an audience thirty-three years ago. The symmetry is not lost on me, though it carries a weight that is harder to articulate than simple nostalgia. In 1993, I stood in that church as a young festival programmer, overwhelmed by music I was hearing properly for the first time, changed by it in the quiet but lasting way that only great art can achieve. This weekend, I will be on the other side of that experience entirely – not in the audience, but as a member of the chorus, one voice among many giving shape to the very music that shaped me. There is something profound in that reversal. A piece that once washed over me as a listener I must now inhabit from the inside, learning its ancient melodies from memory, feeling the harmonies resonate in the chest rather than simply in the ear. Thirty-three years is a long time, and a choral life, like any life, accumulates its experiences in ways you don’t always notice until a moment like this arrives and reveals the arc. From audience to performer, from witness to participant – it turns out the All-Night Vigil was not finished with me after all.