Music / Rachmaninoff Vespers: All-Night Vigil, Oriana Chorale, directed by Dan Walker.  At Anzac Memorial Chapel Duntroon, November 24. Reviewed by SAM WILSON.

As a celebrated a cappella choir prepared to take on ambitious works, Oriana Chorale drew a large crowd to the Duntroon Chapel for its rendition of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil.

Conducted and directed by the Canberra composer, conductor, performer and vocal specialist Dan Walker, Oriana Chorale presents three major concerts each year, with repertoire ranging from the classics to Australian contemporary composers. For the All-Night Vigil, the choir was joined by soloists Andrei Laptev (tenor), Andrew Fysh (bass) and Maartje Sevenster (alto).

A staple of Russian liturgical music and one of the composer’s most praised works, All-Night Vigil is a 15-movement a cappella piece set to texts taken from the Russian Orthodox vigil ceremony, consisting of Vespers (1-6), Matins (7-11), Lauds (12), and Prime (13-15).

Despite being in the general tradition of Russian Orthodox music in terms of style and even musical themes, All-Night Vespers is a complex and challenging piece to perform. Although written for four-part SATB choir, Rachmaninoff frequently breaks into five, six, and eight-part harmony, with the choir even breaking into 11 parts during the seventh movement. Oriana Chorale handled this challenge well, while maintaining a full-bodied and balanced sound.

One secret to achieving this balance and unity is that Dan Walker has his choir mixed, not organised in vocal parts. This forces singers to tune in to what all other parts are doing, and means that each chorister needs to know their own line intimately. The effect was a sound that was beautifully balanced, rich and blended in the quite precise acoustic of the Duntroon Chapel.

Singing convincingly in the Russian language is a massive challenge if Russian is not your native tongue, but Oriana had clearly been coached effectively.

Musically, the choir was impressively self-sufficient, beginning each movement confidently after only an intoned note sung by Walker after striking a tuning fork on his skull. Along with Walkers’s fluid and unfussy conducting style, this gave the performance an elemental, stripped back feeling.

Walker was particularly good at moving the tempo along, shaping phrases, and achieving magical pianississimo endings that simply faded to nothing. Likewise, when the score required fortefortissimo, the choir produced a daunting wall of sound, which any serious Russian or Baltic choir could have been proud of.

All the soloists executed their lines with accomplishment, but Andrei Laptev, whose musical journey has been in the Russian Orthodox tradition, was especially effective.  Bell-like intonation, a restrained use of vibrato, and an affinity with the language and the text all made for an utterly authentic and confident performance.

The All-Night Vigil is a big sing, and requires lots of concentration. Oriana’s performance was just on an hour, and by the end some of the entries and endings were perhaps a little less crisp than at the beginning. Russian choirs are renowned for being able to shake a church’s foundations with low Ds and Cs in the bass line, and Oriana’s basses couldn’t quite achieve this effect (although the notes were there).

This was a very rare opportunity to hear an iconic work performed by a technically very able, well-coached and very musical choir.