Latin offers two words for light: lux, the flame itself, and lumen, the illumination that travels across darkness to reach us — together suggesting something of what music can do, originating in one soul and arriving, transformed, in another.
By candlelight, The Emmanuel Choir offers two masterworks of twentieth-century sacred choral music that speak in a remarkably kindred voice: Frank Martin and Ildebrando Pizzetti — a Swiss Protestant and an Italian Catholic — arrived by different paths at strikingly similar places, a polyphony rooted in Renaissance clarity, a harmony that embraces dissonance without abandoning beauty, and a profound reverence for the sacred text as music's first obligation. That both composers reached this destination in the same year, 1922, without knowledge of each other's work, feels less like coincidence than like something in the air — a shared hunger, across borders, for music that could still speak of the sacred. Martin's Mass for Double Choir — austere, unaccompanied, luminous — sets the ancient liturgy with a modernist's precision and a mystic's devotion; Pizzetti's Messa di Requiem moves through grief toward stillness, its long melodic lines shaped by the rhythms of plainsong and timeless in their gravity.
Join us in the candlelit serenity of Emmanuel Church.
Christian Lane, direction