Winter has long summoned composers to their most intimate and searching work. This January, Grammy-nominated pianist Joy Schreier joins The Emmanuel Choir for an afternoon of choral song-cycles — a form that gathers individual songs into a larger arc of meaning, like movements of light across a winter sky.
The program brings together works united by season and sensibility: Morten Lauridsen's beloved setting of James Agee's Sure on This Shining Night and his Mid-Winter Songs — five chromatic meditations on texts by Robert Graves — explore winter's quiet depths with characteristic warmth and longing; Randall Thompson's Frostiana sets seven poems by Robert Frost, capturing the spare beauty and wry wisdom of the New England landscape; and Jonathan Dove's The Passing of the Year draws on Shakespeare, Tennyson, and others to chart time's passage through the turning seasons. The afternoon also brings the North American premiere of Pride Motets by Christopher Churcher (b. 2004), a vibrant young British composer rapidly emerging onto the international scene. First performed in 2025, the three-movement cycle traces a quietly personal arc from longing and shame to love openly embraced — intimate in scale, but full of hard-won light. Together, these works remind us that winter has always been humanity's season for gathering close and listening deeply.
Joy Schreier, piano
Christian Lane, direction