Seraphic Fire

A punch line gave way to a panorama Thursday night.Waiting for a well-advertised rattle-the-eardrums moment in All Night Vigil (Vespers), Sergei Rachmaninoff’s epic liturgical piece for chorus, the audience at Seraphic Fire’s season-opening performance found itself swept onto far wider, more colorful ground.

The Vespers, listeners knew, would be delivered a cappella in medieval Old Church Slavonic. Seraphic Fire’s professionals, 25 for this concert at Key Biscayne’s St. Christopher’s by the Sea Episcopal Church, had come in from across the country, 16 by plane, others driving from as far as South Carolina. They had rehearsed together in the new language for the first time only days before. Few present had heard The Vespers performed live; no one in the chorus had.

The work unfurls in 15 canticles lifted from chants of the Russian Orthodox Church. They are meant to be sung through the night before Easter, and the moment Rachmaninoff celebrated most comes at the end of part five: ‘Lord, now lettest Thy servant depart in peace.’ At that point, in a slow, concluding scale, the basses descend to a B-flat two octaves below middle C. Don’t try this at home. Leave it to professionals such as the choir’s Joshua Hillmann, Michael Holderer, Steven Hrycelak and Kenneth Kellogg.

Rachmaninoff loved the song and its ending so much that he asked that it be sung at his funeral — which it was, in Los Angeles in 1943. The vocal punch line, though, is just a visceral rumble in an extended meander through a culture’s musical history and the composer’s transformative skill, bringing the colors of symphonic music to simple songs of praise, devotion and exaltation.

Imagine, Seraphic Fire’s conductor and music director Patrick Dupré Quigley suggested to the audience, a piece drawn from the Orthodox roots of Russia and Ukraine and first performed in dire times midway through World War I and just before the Bolshevik revolution. Performance of this and other church music would soon be banned by the government.

The setting for Thursday’s concert might not have been quite right. St. Christopher’s is warm and intimate — wood ceiling and rafters, slate floor — far from a grotto-like monastery or a cathedral’s stone chancel. The acoustics are so lively that Quigley likened them to a fire hose.

‘So loud,’ he said. Loud was just fine, though, for the group’s close ensemble and tight dynamics. In harmony and counterpoint, the singers carried off the composer’s wide range of effects in satisfying style, showcasing the canticles’ differing characters. Rachmaninoff offers just this sort of variety spun from simplicity in later works such as Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, and it also evokes the familiar emotions of his piano concertos and symphonies and tone poems such as Isle of the Dead.

Rachmaninoff dedicated the Vespers to Stepan Vasilyevich Smolensky, the teacher who opened his heart to the ancient church music and its chants.

Through their performances, Quigley and his singers are bringing a similar, welcome lesson to South Florida audiences.