Coming up in Philly music: Saying goodbye in song

Most Americans haven’t heard the two works at the center of the program the Chestnut Street Singers present this weekend. The Chestnut Street Singers produce programs that combine unfamiliar music with strong and sometimes edgy subjects, and this program is no exception. It’s called For Cherishing, and it features choral songs devoted to “loss and remembrance.”

The two central works were created by composers who made major contributions to the British choral tradition. Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry wrote his six-part “Songs of Farewell” during some of the worst years of World War I. Herbert Howells's “Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing,” received its premiere at a 1964 memorial service for John F. Kennedy. Some of that piece had been written earlier, in response to the death of Howells’s son.

The rest of the program spans most of the history of Western music, with a list of composers that includes a 15th-century Flemish master, Johannes Ockeghem; a leader of the musical counter-Reformation, Tomás Luis de Victoria; and a living American Curtis graduate, Robert Convery.

The Chestnut Street Singers are a “cooperative chorus.” Unlike organizations such as the Mendelssohn Club and Choral Arts Philadelphia, they operate without a professional conductor and a paid staff. Their programs are designed by a process that involves a lot of emailing and texting among the singers. They’ve been doing it that way for eight years, and the procedure has produced some of the most intriguingly satisfying programs on the Philadelphia music schedule.

The Chestnut Street Singers will present For Cherishing on Friday, June 1, at 7:30pm at Proclamation Presbyterian Church (278 S. Bryn Mawr Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA); and on Sunday, June 3, at 3pm at First Unitarian Church (2125 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia). Admission is free, but you’re invited “to make a donation that fits your budget.”

Above: An "intriguingly satisfying" vocal ensemble. (Image courtesy of Chestnut Street Singers.)