The signature venue of the Spitalfields festival, Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church, is undergoing renovation, so this year's event is using a variety of music halls and churches. Wesley's Chapel was the setting for this first concert - Rachmaninov's Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, sung by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, conducted by Stephen Cleobury - and what it lacked in size and grandeur, it made up for in atmosphere. Every syllable of the choir's singing was gilded with a gentle halo of resonance, and they created the intensity of a Russian orthodox service in the home of Methodism.
Rachmaninov's piece is not so much a setting of a text as an icon of religious experience. The liturgy, led by Russian orthodox cantor Father Sergei Hackel, was interpolated by choral responses and hymns. Rachmaninov balances the musical sophistication of his psalms and prayers with the arcane rituals and chant of the orthodox tradition; here, the all-male choir became an amplified congregation, ornamenting the unadorned musical lines of the cantor.
The King's College singers relished the melancholy of the music. One of the hymns transformed the familiar notion of longing for salvation into a terrifying existential cry. Even the version of the Lord's Prayer was tinged with ambiguity, depicting the dangers of succumbing to temptation. But the most potent symbol of the depth of Rachmaninov's spirituality was his use of the bass register. The King's College basses opened up an abyss of sound whenever they dropped to these sepulchral sonic regions, an image of incomprehensible vastness.
Arvo Part's settings of The Beatitudes and De Profundis paled in comparison with the range of Rachmaninov's music. Where the Liturgy of St John recreates the experience of a personal encounter with the divine, Part strips all traces of the human from his works, demanding that listeners subjugate themselves to the meditative blandness of his music. His settings reduced the mystery of their texts to empty symbols, even though the King's College singers performed them with virtuosity and commitment.
