Trinity Choir

Time Out says

Fri May 25 2012

Trinity Church Wall Street is an Episcopal parish in lower Manhattan with a charter dating back to 1697. Though its leaders supported the losing side in the Revolutionary War, Trinity’s congregants eventually included Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and George Washington himself.

No less impressive than Trinity’s history are its wide-ranging music programs. They include organ recitals and lunchtime concerts, many of which are webcast or archived on the church’s website (trinitywall street.org). Composer, conductor and keyboardist Julian Wachner was named Trinity’s director of music and the arts in 2010. He and the splendid Trinity Choir recorded Bach’s complete motets for the Musica Omnia label last year. They head uptown to Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall for what promises to be an engrossing evening of spirituals and contemporary music.

Apart from those spirituals—including classics “Precious Lord” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead”—Laura Elise Schwendinger’s Seven Choral Settings (1994) are, wondrous to say, the oldest works on the program. Trinity’s St. Paul’s Chapel sheltered recovery workers after the 9/11 atrocities, and Luna Pearl Woolf’s Après Moi, Le Déluge (2006) commemorates another national calamity: the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. The electrifying Matt Haimovitz, Woolf’s husband, is the cello soloist. Wachner’s own Rilke Songs (2002) are renderings of animal-inspired poems, while the always-inventive Du Yun, whose media range from symphony orchestra to laptop, describes San (2003) as her “inner hearing” of a centuries-old song for qin (an ancient zither).—Marion Lignana Rosenberg

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