The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill played host to the second of three concerts in The Crossing’s “Month of Moderns” series Friday, May 22. A good-sized audience was on hand to hear Donald Nally lead the 24-member chamber choir in a program that featured Bo Holten’s In nomine, Peter McGarr’s Dreaming England: This Scepter’d Isle, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Statements and Examples, Thierry Escaich’s Evocation II for solo organ, James MacMillan’s A New Song, Petr Eben’s Pictures of Hope, Kirsten Broberg’s Breathturn and Steven Stucky’s Whispers.

The concert was both daunting and rewarding — and revelatory on many levels, not the least of which was the portrait it gave of Donald Nally as an interpretive artist.

While Nally prefers to work with a chamber choir exclusively in the repertoire of contemporary music, he is nonetheless a romantic when it comes to his mode of interpreting modern music.

Is he a romantic in the same fashion as Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy were when they conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra? Not quite. However, like both Stoki and Ormandy, Nally is interested in sound and he elicits a particularly distinctive timbral quality from The Crossing not unlike the distinctiveness of the famous “Philadelphia Sound” created by Stokowski and enhanced by Ormandy.

While their specific sound was lush, glistening, sumptuous and lustrous, Nally’s is pointed and focused. While Stoki sought the top-to-bottom contrapuntal clarity of the pipe organs he once played as a virtuoso and Ormandy leaned in the direction of highlighting the strings since he had been a violinist, the genesis for Nally’s tone for The Crossing comes from the highest voices, the sopranos.

There’s also much more attention paid to the sound of the words, themselves. The text often determines the tone of the singing with Nally and The Crossing: in Latin, more open on the vowels; in German, more guttural and darkly colored; in English, more varied and pungent.

As a result, I’d liken Nally to Arturo Toscanini, the greatest operatic and instrumental conductor of the early and middle 20th century. For Toscanini, the printed text was of paramount importance. The same is true for Donald Nally. Although Toscanini was often hailed as a classicist, his conducting was always stamped with his unmistakable personality. The same is true with Donald Nally’s work with The Crossing.

And certainly that was the case on May 22. In nomine was breathtaking in its dreaminess. Dreaming England soared and soothed on the wings of the singing by the sopranos.

Nally and The Crossing will present the third and final installment of “Month of Moderns” Friday, June 5, 8 p.m. in the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. Visit www.crossingchoir.com.

BRITTEN OPERA

The Opera Company of Philadelphia will bring its 2008-09 season to a close with its first performances in the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater. Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, sung in English, will run June 5-14. David Hayes will conduct, and William Kerley will stage direct. Tamara Mumford will sing the title role, Academy of Vocal Arts alumnus Ben Wager will sing the part of her husband, Collantinus, William Burden will sing the part of the male chorus, and Nathan Gunn will portray Tarquinius, the prince who sets the tragedy in motion.

Baritone Nathan Gunn is familiar to local audiences for his appearances with the OCP in the Academy of Music in recent productions of  The Pearl Fishers and Cosi fan tutte. He is also highly regarded as an avid proponent of modern operas. Alongside other mountings of Britten operas, such as Billy Budd, he has appeared in Andre Previn’s Brief Encounter and the operatic version of the classic Elizabeth Taylor/Montgomery Clift film, A Place in the Sun, here known as An American Tragedy from the original Theodore Dreiser novel. Gunn has also worked in such beloved Broadway musicals as Showboat and Camelot.

Gunn explained that he regards Britten’s operas to be much like those of Mozart.

“Like Mozart,” he said, “Britten doesn’t just compose songs to be sung. He weds the music to the text and the drama. The two are inseparable in Britten’s operas, just like they are in Mozart’s. You can’t consider the music alone because the music works to bring the drama to life. It elevates the drama — but it comes from that drama.

“Britten’s operas, like Mozart’s,” he continued, “tackle difficult subjects. The drama in Britten’s operas comes from questions of character. Why does evil corrupt goodness? Why does it feel the need to? A love of beauty and virtue is often a question in his operas, but just by observing beauty and virtue do we change them?”

Call 215-893-1018 or visit www.operaphila.org for ticket information.

AT SETTLEMENT

The Germantown and Jenkintown branches of Settlement Music School will host an Open House Saturday, June 6, 10 a.m. until 1 p.m., for prospective students during the summer session and the regular season starting in September.

At the Germantown Branch, at 6128 Germantown Ave., there will be a performance by the Children’s Choir from 10 to 10:45 a.m., a Suzuki Flute Workshop from 10 till 11 a.m., an opportunity to meet instructors and sit in on lessons from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m., pre-registration for summer and fall classes and lessons from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and student performances from 111 through 11:45 a.m. Refreshments will be served throughout the day.

Auditions for Settlement’s Gleeksman-Kohn Children’s Choir, directed by Rae Ann Anderson, are also being scheduled at the Germantown Branch from 4 – 7 p.m., Friday, June 10, for youngsters in grades three through eight.

For more details, call 215-320-2600 or visit www.smsmusic.org.