The New York Times, Monday, January 24, 2000
Star-Ledger, Monday, January 24, 2000
(Both reviews are from the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's 
Rachmaninoff Festival "Re-Encountering Rachmaninoff" 
performed on Friday, January 21, 2000.)

Paul Griffiths, The New York Times, August 18, 1998

The New York Times, Monday, January 24, 2000
Restraint, Subtleties and Bells for a Celestial Vision
By James R. Oestreich
EXCERPTS
Princeton, N.J. January 21
...But perhaps the most valuable "peripheral" event was the concert of choral music here at the Princeton University Chapel this evening... The Russian Chamber Chorus of New York opened the program with extended excerpts from Rachmaninoff's Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom... The Russian Chamber Chorus, directed by Nikolai Kachanov, has done noble work in presenting Tchaikovsky's liturgical works in recent years, and the performance here boded well for similar success with Rachmaninoff. The group continues to gain in refinement.

[T]he treatment of of the simple word "alleluia" is itself a wonder, with joy being expressed, in one case, in a tolling of bells, a favorite device of Rachmaninoff....; in another, with a rising figure and a harmonic expansion illuminating the syllable "lu."

The suppleness and otherworldliness of its sound here made the look of the score on the page seem impossibly square and made the secular works in the rest of the program seem all the more mundane.

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The Star-Ledger, Monday, January 24, 2000
A Platform for Choral Harmony
By Willa J. Conrad
EXCERPTS
New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's Rachmaninoff Festival
"Voices of Rachmaninoff" choral concert
The Russian Chamber Chorus of New York was an inspired choice as the first guest. The choir, directed by Nikolai Kachanov, is small but well-schooled in the richly aromatic Russian choral style that depends on resonant, velvety, deep bass voices that ripple upward through waves of purely articulated treble voices in consonant harmonies.

..The Russian Chorus' presentation... complete with chanted prayers and response, felt exotic and ritualistic, as if the listeners were eavesdropping on a previous century religious rites... Kachanov's feel for the pulse of the music was secure and organic... Upper voices flew off a bass or tenor's intonations in an exciting, spontaneous way; the singers' excellent ear for pitch enhanced this bubbling outward effect...Raw, open harmonies accentuated the wide palette of sound...the constant wavelike rhythms, an obvious imitation of church bells tolling, propelled the words forward.

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The New York Times, August 18, 1998
By Paul Griffiths
"The performance of the Tchaikovsky Liturgy was splendid. The Russian Chamber Chorus of New York under Nikolai Kachanov, was radiant and sonorous; Š and the whole Slavonic sound was effective."

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