Vocalist Glenn Miller has a singing voice so low that it can make the ground shake — and he’s coming to Amherst this weekend.
The choir Illumine Vocal Arts Ensemble will perform Rachmaninoff’s “All-Night Vigil” on Sunday, May 17 at 4 p.m. at St. Brigid’s Parish in Amherst, featuring Grammy Award-winning basso profondo soloist Glenn Miller. Despite its name, the piece lasts only about an hour rather than through the night. The program will also include Pavel Chesnokov’s “Spaseniye” and “Do Not Reject Me in My Old Age.”
A basso profondo, also called an “oktavist,” is a singer whose voice reaches an octave lower than a typical bass voice. When Illumine director Arianne Abela first heard Miller’s voice more than a decade ago, she recalls being stunned.
“I remember feeling the ground rumble and move when he started singing, and I was blown away by his voice,” she said.
Abela and Miller are longtime friends, and this will be his second performance with Illumine after the group’s 2025 performance of Joby Talbot’s “Path of Miracles.”
Miller is no stranger to the “All-Night Vigil” — he’s performed it more than 100 times, both live and in recordings. At this point, he said, he can just about sing the whole thing through from memory.
“It’s a well that just keeps on giving,” he said. “And it’s been the binding thread of my vocal career.”
In fact, he keeps a spreadsheet of all the times he performs Rachmaninoff works at concerts, with notes on the venue, the chorus size and other performance details.
“It’s a good read. I kind of joke about it — ‘I’m going to have it blown up and put on a big poster board at my wake,’” he said with a laugh.
For Miller, what makes the “All-Night Vigil” impactful is that it’s “such a journey from beginning to end” and has “such a spectrum of sound color going on.” Rachmaninoff, he said, “knows how to strike a balance with textures, so it’s not full-throttle all the time or the same stillness all the time; there are these peaks and valleys.”
Miller added that the “All-Night Vigil” has moments when listeners “really feel the oppression of the Russian culture.” The piece was written before the Russian Revolution, “so the storm clouds were really gathering, and he was making a statement about it. Even though he wasn’t particularly religious, there was a human statement about it. … You can just feel the vastness of the tundra in it at times.”
Most of the “All-Night Vigil” comes from three parts of the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy service: Vespers, Matins, and the First Hour. Miller appreciates Divine Liturgies for their immersive nature.
“They sing absolutely everything, because that’s the language of the angels. Speaking is an earthly thing, so you’re separating yourself out from things earthly, and it puts you in a zone, and it’s a whole sensory thing,” he said, noting the combination of incense, icons and candles. Those services, he said, are “such a far cry from the culture that we live in.”
Similarly, the “All-Night Vigil” is “a pinnacle work of the tradition,” he said.
Abela wanted to have the group perform the “All-Night Vigil” both to bring Miller back for another collaboration and to honor the late Boris Wolfson. A close friend of Miller’s, Wolfson was a Russian professor at Amherst College, where Abela directs the choral program.
When Abela first arrived at Amherst College, she got in touch with Wolfson, and he suggested she check out Miller’s work. The two had wanted to bring Miller to Amherst for a performance, but “life just kept getting complicated,” she said. Wolfson wasn’t able to see Miller perform there before his death in 2024.
“I feel really sad, but I wanted to honor him and bring the piece here in his memory, because he just loved the piece so much and loved Glenn’s singing so much,” she said. “I was thinking about Boris and how we could continue to put this project together, even though he’s not around. So, all of those things combined, it just felt like the right time.”
Abela said the “All-Night Vigil” is “simple and perfect as it is,” and the fact that the piece does not have any instruments helps make it “more sacred and special. It’s just the human voice producing all of these layers and complexities.”
“I think you can step away from the troubles of life and just sit there and absorb the beauty of the piece … it’s one of those works that people can relate to, no matter what they believe in and what they are going through at the time,” she said. “And it just felt like we needed some more beauty right now.”
In general, she said, Rachmaninoff’s music has lasting power because it manages to be both “simple and complex at the same time.” The harmonies are “traditionally grabbing” and beautiful, yet they remain “accessible to everybody” rather than overly dense or difficult to follow, she added.
Abela shared a story about one of her choir members, whose Russian electrician had seen a Rachmaninoff score on the choir member’s table and said, “This music is not by Rachmaninoff. It’s directly from the angels.”
Abela agreed. “It’s something so heavenly and so magical. It’s almost like, ‘How did a human being write this?’”
Admission is offered on a $10 to $40 sliding scale. To purchase tickets or for more information, visit illuminechoir.org.
