ECSTASY / GRIEF
Choral-Orchestral Cries
Saturday, October 24, 2026 - 4pm
The Church of the Holy Trinity
1904 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia opens its 153rd season, Out of Many, One, with a program that lives inside the extremes — the sacred agony and ecstatic release that sit at the heart of our human experiences.
The evening opens with
Franz Schubert's Mass No. 2 in G,
a work of radiant simplicity and quiet devotion. Composed when Schubert was still a teenager, the Mass has an almost conversational warmth, with melodies that are singable and lofty. It became one of the most beloved of Schubert's early sacred works, prized for its intimacy: faith expressed through tenderness rather than grandeur.
That intimacy carries into Weaver of Eternities, a work by Mendelssohn Chorus Artistic Director Dominick DiOrio, with text by Philadelphia poet and playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger, featuring saxophonist Valentin Kovalev as soloist. The piece reflects on the hopes parents hold for a newborn child, with the infant's first cries evoked through the saxophone. Many voices and threads come together in a single, joyful fabric.
The program continues with James MacMillan's Seven Last Words from the Cross, a modern work for chorus and strings that moves through betrayal, suffering, and transcendence. Commissioned by BBC Television and drawing on all four Gospel accounts of Jesus's death, the work was first broadcast in seven nightly episodes during Holy Week of 1994. MacMillan's score is intense and direct — a meditation on human suffering that arrives, in its final moments, at a quiet peace.
Joined by the
Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Mendelssohn Chorus brings all three works into conversation across a single afternoon.
About Seven Last Words from the Cross
“…probably MacMillan’s masterpiece… the maturity in this composition is astounding: the tonal structure of the seven settings, harmony which can be spare or lush without ever being overwritten, an inexorable sense of the drama in the text, the balance between voice and strings. A few seconds, in difficult times, when meditation was centre stage, when it was possible to regain optimism.”
The Guardian