With less than a month to go before the start of its 2025-26 season, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia (COP) announced that it would no longer be performing at the Kimmel Center, the ensemble’s home for nearly 25 years. Longtime subscribers were no doubt left scratching their heads and wondering where they would spend the concert season scheduled to open with shows Saturday, Oct. 11, and Sunday, Oct. 12.

The orchestra has been one of the resident ensembles at the Center City venue since 2001, playing the vast majority of its concerts in the 600-seat Perelman Theater including regular Sunday performances. And yet, with reasonable hindsight, the crashing collision between the far-too-small number of seats at the Perelman and the similarly-challenged size of the Kimmel’s endowment was inevitable.

When the Kimmel Center was originally proposed in the late 1990s, the intent was for its foot print to occupy the entirety of the square block between Broad and 15th Streets, and Spruce and Pine Streets, with the obvious exception of the Greek revival masterpiece of the former University of the Arts along South Broad. Unfortunately, the owners of a parcel of land at the intersection of 15th and Pine Streets were uncooperative. The series of town houses built on the property still stand to this day.

As a result, the Kimmel’s foot print had to be reduced in size. The unavoidable victim of this shrinking was the Perelman Theater, the smaller of the two principal venues. Verizon Hall – the home intended for the Philadelphia Orchestra and now mercifully renamed “Marian Anderson Hall” – was, at 2,500 seats, already more than 400 seats smaller than the Academy of Music, the Orchestra’s historic first home.

The Perelman, however, was thought to still be a viable space, even at 600 seats, a number below the originally intended 1,000. And that very well might have been the case if the Kimmel, as a whole, had a sizable enough endowment to subsidize the rental fees to make the venue’s use a viable option for the region’s not-for-profit performing ensembles.

If ever in the world there was wishful thinking, that was it. But in reality, The COP struggled. The Academy of Vocal Arts Opera Theater never gave much thought to staging its productions there – it would have bankrupted the school in a season. Even the Curtis Institute of Music Opera Theater – with the school’s hundreds of millions of dollars endowment – eventually gave it up as the site of company’s fully-staged productions. Only the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, with its smaller numbers of performers onstage for any given recital, has managed to manage it.

In an interesting twist, The COP will replace its Sunday afternoon concerts at the Perelman with performances in the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square in Center City. It’s the very venue where the ensemble, founded in 1964 by Marc Mostovoy and then named Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, previously played their Sunday afternoon concerts. Holy Trinity Church seats a solid 900, is a breathtaking vision of Victorian Romanesque Revival, and has among the region’s most sumptuous acoustics.

Recognizing the wealth of potential on the Main Line, the Saturday, 7:30 p.m., concerts will be performed in Bryn Mawr College’s Goodhart Hall, a Gothic Revival masterpiece unmatched for its beauty in our region.

For more information regarding the sites of the season’s remaining concerts, visit chamberorchestra.org.

Choral Evensong

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Chestnut Hill, hosted its first Choral Evensong of the season, Sunday, Sept. 28, at 5 p.m. One day in the advance of the historic Feast, itself, the service was dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel and All Angels and featured choral music by Peter Nardone, Barry Rose, Edward Bairstow and Richard Dering, along with organ music by Gabriel Faure and Niels Gade. Andrew Kotylo, the parish’s director of music, conducted the 30-plus members of the Adult Choir and he and organ scholar Andy Brown shared the console of the church’s Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ.

I was particularly impressed by Bairstow’s settings of the “Magnificat” and “Nunc dimittis” – the former scintillating with hope, the latter, coursed with gentle reassurance.

New Artist Recital

The Academy of Vocal Arts opened its 2025-26 season with its “New Artist Recital,” Friday, Sept. 26, in the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square. The church was packed with a good 600 opera music lovers, José Meléndez directed and accompanied at the piano superbly, and all seven of the new arrivals sang beautifully.

Most thrilling of them all were bass Ryan Wornall in “This Nearly Was Mine” from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s magnificent musical “South Pacific,” and tenor Matthew Sink in the last great tenor aria ever composed, ‘Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.” Wornall sang with deeply resonant resignation and Sink nailed his aria’s penultimate “High B” resolving into the final “A” with the clarion brilliance of a trumpeter swan. AVA remains at the pinnacle of its form.

Jasper Chamber Players

The Jasper Chamber Players will open their 10th season Thursday, October 16, at 7:30 p.m. in the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting on Mermaid Lane. They will perform a program of music by Gabriela Lena Frank, Reinaldo Moya and Antonin Dvorak.

For more information contact jasperquartet@gmail.com. You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net.