By Nick Smith, 3rd June 2023 

The human voice is particularly stirring like no other instrument.

As infants ushered into the world, human voices are commonly the first sounds to reach our ears. So naturally their impact upon us reverberates on a deeply profound level. Just as visual artists exploit our strongly-biological interest in human faces, so too have musicians throughout the ages leveraged the spellbinding power of voices.

As the world of music shifts ever-more towards arrangements conceived & woven entirely in the digital domain, last night was a return to humanity’s spiritual roots as I attended a MSO Chorus performance of Rachmaninov’s Vespers (also known as All Night Vigil) at St Mary Star of the Sea church in West Melbourne.

Built in 1882, St Mary is a beautiful old stone church who’s edifice loomed as a foreboding presence from the blackness of crisp winter’s evening. Here’s a fun fact – the church’s interior was used as a set for the 2007 supernatural Nicolas Cage film Ghost Rider.

Inside the June air’s chill was swiftly banished, replaced by the warm glow of religious iconography generating waves of awoken ancestral memories, reminders of simpler times in which men gazed up at the stars and pondered their place in a universe of unanswered questions.

Arriving early as I generally prefer, there was no allocated seating for this particular event so I found a seat near the front of the congregation. Years of earphone listening have trained my ears to prefer an upfront presentation close to the stage, with as little separating me from the performers as possible.

Such a privilege one must normally pay a premium for when booking tickets at most venues, but here the luxury was afforded merely by arriving twenty minutes early.

For as long as memory stretches back I’d not attended a live choir performance, so you can understand my trepidation at what to expect. Would I be baffled, underwhelmed or even bored?

To prepare, a long train ride to attend afforded the ideal chance to absorb a performance of Rachmaninov’s Vespers via my Airpod Pro 2’s. I found the music soothing, meditative and spiritual, but absent of the attention-grabbing hooks present in the EDM that’s constituted much of my recent musical diet.

It goes without saying that recorded music, regardless of the quality of one’s system, cannot hope to match the quality of a live performance.

Simply by being surrounded others, the experience of listening changes changes as you may well imagine. However standing only several feet away from a large chorus of performers the sheer overwhelming force of sound is quite remarkable.

From an audiophile perspective, I noted not only how much louder, clearer & more powerful individual voices were than their recorded equivalents, but how effortlessly multiples voices singing simultaneously remained distinct without collapsing together.

Listening required substantially less concentration, and although SPLs were far higher than I’d set through earphones, my ears felt less fatigued. Individual vocal syllables were effortless to distinguish, and the dynamics engendered a far greater sense of drama.

With its’ tremendously high ceilings, the church’s acoustics deepened the spiritual overtones of the material as each voice was free to resonate upwards without limit. At times individual voices could easily be distinguished -particularly the three solo performers- whilst at others the entire chorus unified into a solitary voice.

Crescendos of sound washed over in waves, each dragging me deeper into sentiments as old as mankind itself. The words were unfathomable, but the meaning was plain. Choral music has never made up a large part of my collection, but the resounding beauty of last night’s performance has sparked an invigorated interest in this oldest of genres.

Thank you for reading, may your days be lit by the sonorous tones of tranquil voices.