Rachmaninoff's "All-Night Vigil," since its premiere on March 23, 1915, at the Column Hall of the Noble Assembly in Moscow, has become one of the most precious gems in the treasury of Russian sacred music. The foundation of Rachmaninoff's "All-Night Vigil" is rooted in ancient Russian church chants, known as znamenny chant.
The primary distinction of Rachmaninoff's "All-Night Vigil" from the works of his predecessors (such as Tchaikovsky, Ippolitov-Ivanov, Panchenko, Rebikov, and others) was that he approached this composition in a completely different manner – not merely as an arrangement of borrowed material, but as a new, polyphonically developed music.
