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For sheer beauty, visceral and spiritual impact, little in this vast catalog surpasses Russian liturgical music. An unmissable musical offering occurs Sunday at the Cathedral Basilica St. Louis, when the Bach Society presents Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “All-Night Vigil,” (Vsénoshchnoye bdéniye). Americans call the 1915 masterpiece “Rachmaninoff’s Vespers,”— a slight misnomer, since only the first 6 of 15 a cappella movements correspond to the canonical hours at sundown.

Change in art and other cultural material rarely occurs neatly and suddenly. For example, the Latin language never died; it speciated into Italian, French, Spanish and other tongues. Most changes manifested gradually in classical music, too. By mid-career, Beethoven sounds like you think Beethoven sounds, but earlier, he often sounded like Mozart or Haydn, 14 and 38 years his senior respectively.

In contrast, the forms of Russian liturgical music as crafted in the late 1800s and early 1900s by leading lights such as Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Pyotr Goncharov (Russian-Ukranian), Aleksandr Sheremetev, Alexander Nikolsky and Pavel Chesnokov, reached a clear, abrupt end with the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union imposed state atheism and seized all church property, murdering over a thousand priests by the mid-1920s. While suppression of religious practice varied from place to place and year to year, the government quashed new sacred music.

Chesnokov ceased writing music and died destitute, Goncharov transitioned to work for the state and Sheremetev fled to Finland. Rachmaninoff emigrated to New York City in 1918, living in the United States thereafter.

In this context, the “All-Night Vigil” stands as a musical landmark, nearly as a requiem for an entire musical tradition. On YouTube you can find many performances of the “Vigil” though recordings were rare until the 1980s. But for a suitable introduction to multiple composers of the genre, head to Amazon Music, where you can hear Chorovaya Akademia’s 1995 album “Ancient Echoes,” also available on disc.

Outside of a Russian Orthodox church, it’s hard to find a more felicitous venue for this piece than St. Louis’ “new” Cathedral, dedicated in 1914, one year prior to this work’s premiere. Scott Kennebeck, artistic director of the Cathedral Concerts agrees: “The stunning beauty of the Cathedral Basilica’s mosaics creates a unique experience for concertgoers to be enveloped, by not only the aural experience but a feast for the eyes as well. This is the perfect place to experience Rachmaninoff’s ‘All-Night Vigil.’”

A. Dennis Sparger, the Bach Society’s music director, reports that this week’s performance will mark only the fifth of the work by the Bach Society, thrice before at the Cathedral but not since 2007. Their most recent took place at St. Stanislaus Church in 2017. Sparger calls the combination of the work and the venue “a match made in heaven.”

Instrumentalists can struggle to navigate the Cathedral’s acoustics, but Sparger sees them as a strength: “Just as the music of Bach requires a venue with a relatively low level of reverberation to allow clarity for all his fast-moving passages, the choral music of Rachmaninoff sounds best in a rich acoustic which allows the sound to blossom and envelop the listener. Few places offer that kind of opportunity other than a massive cathedral.”

Multiple performance challenges face the Bach Society in mounting the “Vigil,” which requires personnel past the soprano-alto-tenor-bass crew. Many of Russian Liturgical music’s most thrilling moments issue from oktavists, basses with supernatural-seeming low range. Rachmaninoff calls for at least two such men, whom you don’t just bump into at Schnucks.

He also licenses women to dwell in the basement, as a contralto sings an especially gorgeous solo in the second hymn, derived from the 104th Psalm, “Bless the Lord, O my Soul.” The Bach Society has engaged Emily Marvosh, whose voice Sparger describes as “a rich, burnished color, a distinguished sound.” He praises, too, the other soloist, John Ramseyer, a tenor, whose “bright clear voice can linger on the high notes with ease.”

Then there’s language: Rachmaninoff set the “Vigil” to the customary Orthodox liturgical language, Church Slavonic. (This article uses English titles.) For the Bach Society, Sparger asserts that the “Vigil” demands twice the rehearsal time of a Latin work. And its sources vary: “Of the 15 separate hymns, 9 are based on ancient chants from Ukraine, Russia and Greece.”

The “All-Night Vigil’s” greatest draw remains the emotional pull of the music. Each hymn could stand alone, but choirs excerpt some more than others, like the second, and the sixth, a “Hail Mary.” The oktavists will knock your socks off again in the seventh, “Glory to God in the Highest.”

But many listeners’ favorite remains the fifth, “Now Lettest Depart Thou,” whose fans included its composer, who requested it for his own funeral. The oktavists plumb the depths of the soul, pianissimo, softly landing on a B-flat more than three octaves below middle C. Time bends. This moment alone justifies attendance.

Sparger sums the appeal of the “All-Night Vigil” with a contrast drawn to the Bach Society’s namesake. “If the music of Bach reflects the perfection of God, it’s the ‘Vespers’ by Rachmaninoff that reflect the beauty awaiting in the heavenly kingdom.” But one needn’t adhere to religion to love this music’s emotional power.

Editor's note: This story has been edited to correct the spelling of A. Dennis Sparger.