East Germantown’s Donald Nally and The Crossing, the four-time Grammy Award winning professional choir, will present the world premiere of Christopher Cerone’s “Of being numerous,” Friday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. in the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 8855 Germantown Ave. The choir will present a second performance of the work Sunday, Nov. 23, at 5 p.m., in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The new work draws its name from a poem written by George Oppen (1908-1984), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and American dissident who suspended writing for nearly two decades while participating in the resistance against the threat of fascism and attacks on free speech in post-World War II America.

The concert marks a first-time collaboration between The Crossing and Present Music of Milwaukee, a contemporary music organization that commissioned “Of being numerous.”

Nally explained, “The Crossing has long waited to debut a piece from Christopher Cerone, and this collaboration with the adventuresome musicians of Present Music in Milwaukee brought about this opportunity — a new work with dramatically relevant content, focusing on the poetry of George Oppen, who wrote in another time of political tumult and a fractured society.”

Cerone has long loved Oppen’s work. “His insistence that we need each other, that the singular self is insufficient. Beyond the obvious analogy of a choir — numerous voices that speak as one — I was drawn to a text about the messy embrace of other people at a time when rampant isolation and individualism tear at society’s fabric.”

The composer’s new work will be paired with Caroline Shaw’s “Ochre,” winner of the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance. The work focuses on humanity’s relationship to the earth in a series of seven scenes, each named for an oxide compound — literally what we walk on.

In Shaw’s own words, “’Ochre’ is about how we consider and care for the ground beneath our feet – our Earth, ourselves, our histories, our sense of the scale of our lives in the context of geological history. It’s also about color, and the sensation of music as color or as a complex concoction of materials that we perceive as a kind of color. For me, that metaphor extends naturally to how we understand each other as humans — complex archives of private experiences.”

For more information, visit crossingchoir.org.

Faure’s ‘Solemn Requiem Mass’

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Chestnut Hill marked the “Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed,” Sunday, Nov. 2, with a liturgy of the Holy Eucharist that included a performance of Gabriel Faure’s beloved setting of the Roman Catholic Church’s “Solemn Requiem Mass.” Parish music director Andrew Kotylo, with organ scholar Andy Brown at the church’s magnificent Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ, conducted a stellar performance by the 40-plus member Adult Choir during the observance, which is dedicated to praying for the souls of the deceased,

Faure’s “Requiem Mass” is unique in the canon of settings of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead in that the composer based his late romantic musical language firmly and unshakably on the modal melodies of harmonies of Gregorian chant. It’s almost as though the late 19th century somehow managed to channel the 9th century, a thousand years before. The result is music that speaks from the heart and soul of Faure’s own time through the medieval spirituality of the foundations of western society.

Despite the sublime beauty of the score and the ravishing passion of the interpretation it received, it was difficult not noticing the dichotomy between the Anglican liturgy commemorating the faithful departed and the liturgical text of Faure’s “Solemn Requiem Mass,” translated from the original Latin into English, praying for the souls in Purgatory to be granted grace and subsequent entrance into the full glory of Paradise. Purgatory is a specifically Catholic belief.

All the same, the performance was so expert and compelling that I, for one, was taken away by it into an enhanced realm of faith.

50th Anniversary

Pianist Emanuel Ax celebrated the 50th anniversary of his first performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra – in June of 1975 – by returning to its stage for a set of concerts the first weekend in November. With music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium, Ax gave an impressive performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Opus 37. The Steinway & Sons concert grand piano sparkled under Ax’s expert fingers and the pianist and Nezet-Seguin gave the composer’s first mature piano concerto a splendid reading.

The program opened with William Grant Still’s “Wood Notes,” a suite of five movements of impressionistic delicacy rendered with sublime sensitivity under Nézet-Séguin’s baton. After intermission Sunday afternoon, the maestro led the Orchestra in Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 in F major, Opus 90. The performance didn’t erase my memories of the Orchestra’s late music director, Eugene Ormandy, leading the same score with his “Fabulous Philadelphians” in the Academy of Music, but it was powerful and focused.

You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net.