Unlike Westerners working with Catholic and Protestant texts, Russian composers setting Orthodox liturgy have had only an intermittent series of inspirations to draw on. Rachmaninov, with his Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom of 1910, was preceded by Tchaikovsky and a few other composers in setting this text, but the idea of an orchestral, polyphonic setting of the liturgy that could be performed outside of a church was still seen as undesirable or even blasphemous by many Orthodox clerics. The work found favor neither ...
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Unlike Westerners working with Catholic and Protestant texts, Russian composers setting Orthodox liturgy have had only an intermittent series of inspirations to draw on. Rachmaninov, with his Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom of 1910, was preceded by Tchaikovsky and a few other composers in setting this text, but the idea of an orchestral, polyphonic setting of the liturgy that could be performed outside of a church was still seen as undesirable or even blasphemous by many Orthodox clerics. The work found favor neither with Russian Communists nor with the underground and fervent church, and after World War I it fell into obscurity, to be resurrected only in the 1980s. It is thus much less often heard than Rachmaninov's Vespers (All-Night Vigil) or his choral symphony The Bells. The work has none of the basso rumblings of the Vespers, and it seems to have been written with an eye or ear toward pleasing its churchly critics: its language is spare and often chant-like, with frequent use of monophonic...
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