East meets west

For Steven Fox, music director of The Clarion Choir, Rachmaninov's anniversary year presents the perfect opportunity to celebrate the composer's often overlooked choral music, as he tells Charlotte Smith

- Charlotte Smith

In the darkest days of the pandemic, as I was sitting at home, it occurred to me that 2023 would be a significant year the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninov's I birth. Would I live to see another anniversary of such importance? Perhaps if I lived to 90! So, I thought to myself, "If we ever get though this, I'm going to celebrate properly."

Steven Fox, music director of New York's Clarion Choir, is speaking to me in a restaurant just a stone's throw away from 505 West End Avenue, the stately New York apartment where Rachmaninov and his wife Natalia eventually settled after fleeing the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Fox is telling me about his very special project for 2023 - to conduct all of Rachmaninov's major choral works. 'I had no worries that orchestras would celebrate the symphonies and that pianists would perform the concertos, but so little attention is given to his choral works in general,' he continues, and they were his favourite works. The two works he was most proud of at the end of his life were the All Night Vigil and The Bells - he even requested that part of the Vigil be sung at his funeral.'

Fox is a Russian music specialist, having studied the Russian language at school and at university - and subsequently making several trips to St Petersburg and Moscow during his tertiary studies at New England's Dartmouth College and London's Royal Academy of Music. The first time he heard Russian spoken by a teacher at his New York high school, he fell in love with its 'dark and mysterious sounds' and instantly gave up French so he could immerse himself in the exotic and captivating dialect.