Valentin Radu -- founder, artistic director and conductor of Vox Ama Deus – has announced the ensemble’s 2024-25 season. Covering a span of dates beginning with Sept. 8, 2024, and running through June 8, 2025, the Romanian-born Radu and his family of instrumental and vocal groups will present a full dozen programs of music ranging from the baroque to the 20th century.

 Four of those programs will receive local performances at the Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Chestnut Hill. The first is scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 9, at 8 p.m. The evening is dubbed “Vivaldissimo” and offers a cornucopia of solo, duo and tutti concerto composed by Venice’s “Red Priest,” Antonio Vivaldi. The Italian maestro, along with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, comprise the “Holy Trinity” of baroque composers.

 Radu will lead his Vox Renaissance Consort of voices and period instruments in “Renaissance Noel” Saturday, Dec. 14, at 8 p.m. The same ensemble will return to Chestnut Hill for “Renaissance Candlemas” Saturday, Feb. 1, 2025, at 8 p.m. Radu and the Camerata Ama Deus Baroque Chamber Orchestra will pay their final visit of the season to St. Martin’s Church Saturday, March 1, at 8 p.m. for “Brilliant Baroque,” a celebration of concertos, suites and sinfonias by many of the leading composers of the 17th and early 18th centuries. 

 For more information about these concerts and Vox’s entire 2024-25 season, call 610-688-2800 or visit VoxAmaDeus.org.

 Orchestra on the Square

 Recalling its past, when it was at the heart of Philadelphia’s sadly departed “Mozart on the Square Festival,” the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia will perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Grand Partita” Serenade No. 10 in B-flat major and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Octet in E-flat major Thursday, June 27, at 7 p.m. in the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square in Center City. 

 In its initial incarnation as Marc Mostovoy’s Concerto Soloists, the current Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia performed a spring/summer season of concerts in and around Rittenhouse Square. The Concerto Soloists also presented a six-concert series of Sunday afternoon performances at the Church. Although several other venues were included, most of the concerts in “Mozart on the Square” were given at Holy Trinity.

 The historic church’s current organist and director of music is Chestnut Hill’s Donald Meineke. And in yet another historic “local connection,” the newly installed gallery organ was originally placed in the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia at 17th and Sansom Streets. As artistic director of Choral Arts Philadelphia, Meineke also conducts a series of concerts at Holy Trinity.

 For more information call 215-545-1739 or visit chamberorchestra.org.

 ‘Month of Moderns 1’

 Donald Nally and The Crossing are scheduled to perform the second in the choir’s   “Month of Moderns” series tonight, June 27, with “Month of Moderns 2: Prairie in Our Backyard” at 7 p.m. at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church. On June 15, the choir performed “Month of Moderns 1” before an audience that virtually packed the church. The concert’s program featured three works: “According to Seneca” by Gabriel Jackson from 2011, “The Woman Where We Are Living” by Robert Maggio from 2014, and “In a House Besieged” by Stacy Garrop from 2022.

 Listening to “According to Seneca” felt like a homecoming. It had been commissioned by Nally and The Crossing with funds provided by the Philadelphia Music Project and had received its world premiere in the very church in which it was now being heard. With a text written by Gustav Sobin, it offers a sweeping imagery of responses and emotions that are expressed in a spectrum of textures, harmonies and rhythms seducing the listener into its unique world of sounds.

 Nally and his choristers gave it a reading that bristled with scintillating timbres characterized by immaculate tuning and flawless balance.  

 Maggio’s “The Woman Where We Are Living” was the program’s most thought-provoking selection. Its text comes from notes taken by Dr. Alois Alzheimer at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. And yes – this is the very doctor whose name was given to the specific condition of senility that strikes so many older adults throughout the world. 

 The music is appropriately varied from the startlingly sparse to the powerfully undeniable. Along with harpist Elizabeth Steiner, Nally and The Crossing gave it a devastating interpretation.

 After intermission, organist Scott Dettra joined Nally and the choir for the local premiere of “In a House Besieged,” a commission by the Cleveland Music of Art set to a text by Lydia Davis. While both bleak and pointillistic, Stacy Garrop’s score is deceptively beguiling. It secretly invites the listener into its sonic universe to involve you in its narrative of unavoidable doom.

 By making expert use of the full spectrum of sounds a pipe organ can produce, Dettra and The Crossing gave the work a stunning rendition.

 For information, visit crossingchoir.org.