Artistic Staff & Guest Biographies
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Song for Athene - John Tavener
No preamble. No easing in. Tavener opens the door and walks straight into it: life a shadow and a dream. The Alleluia here is not a celebration — it is something that rises through grief because grief demands it. Weeping and praise are not opposites. Tonight, they are the same sound.
Chris Lecluyse, Soloist
Only in Sleep - Eriks Esenvalds
We all know this feeling. The moment when waking life becomes too much — too loud, too heavy, too insistently present — and something in us reaches, quietly and without permission, for a place where things are softer. Where the people we have lost come back.
Where time has not yet done what time does. Teasdale names that place: sleep. Ešenvalds’ music lives entirely inside it — floating, unhurried, never quite landing. But the question rises and refuses to quiet itself: do they, too, dream of me? Even the escape is incomplete. And somehow, in naming that so honestly, it becomes just barely bearable.
Sara Teasdale, Text
Grace Brigham, Soloist
Consolamini - B. E. Boykin
“Comfort ye, my people.” Not a solution. A companion. Boykin’s setting names sadness and fear before it offers anything — it does not skip to the answer. The comfort here is rhythmic, physical, insistent. It moves because real consolation is not passive. It leans in.
Te Deum - Herbert Howells
Howells asks the choir for everything — and tonight, this choir gives it. The harmonies are vast, luminous, at times almost unbearably beautiful.
This is communal praise forged from complexity, not detached from it. And still, even here, the final words are a plea: let me never be confounded. The grandeur does not erase the uncertainty. It holds it and sings anyway.
Interlude - Sonata No. 1 in F minor
The choir steps back. The organ holds the space — grounded, patient, alone. A threshold between what has been spoken and what is still to come. Rest here. Breathe.
Movement IV by Felix Mendelssohn
Ben Tischner, Organ
Silver Rain - B. E. Boykin
The world does not pause for grief. Rain still falls. Butterflies still lift their wings. New leaves still find a way to sing. Boykin offers this not as comfort exactly, but as witness — look, life insists on itself. The wonder spreads whether we are ready for it. There is something almost defiant about beauty continuing.
Evie Gilgen, Cello
Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in G - C. V. Stanford
Two canticles. One arc. The Magnificat is a declaration — bold, exultant, the order of things overturned: the mighty brought low, the humble lifted, the hungry filled.
Then the Nunc Dimittis exhales: Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. Upheaval, then release. Proclamation, then surrender. This is the shape of a human life — and of this evening — held inside a single liturgical breath.
Chris Lecluyse, Soloist
Grace Brigham, Soloist
It is Well with My Soul - arr. Mack Wilberg
Horatio Spafford wrote these words after losing his daughters to the sea. Not after the grief had passed — from inside it. Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say: it is well.
This is where the program has always been going. Not to triumph. Not to resolution. To this: a person in the middle of the wreckage, choosing — somehow — to say it is well. That is not an easy word.
Tonight, this choir earns the right to sing it.
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