The chorale’s 2024 concerts included Songs of the Americas, a program that featured Hispanic music by historic composers. Cantos y Cuentos is the flip side, with music from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Many of the works on the program are driven by dance rhythms, so percussionists Alexis Corbin and Hovey Corbin will join the chorale’s 16 vocalists on several of the numbers. One of them is the “De Profundis” by Venezuelan composer Cristian Grases, who is currently a professor of choral music at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music.

The piece’s rhythmic profile includes mixed meters and ostinato (persistently repeated) patterns, both of which are frequently heard in contemporary Latin American music. Partway through the “De Profundis,” the rhythmic energy is reinforced when the percussionists begin playing on a cumaco drum. “One person plays on the head of it with sticks and the other on the body of it,” Habermann says. “So it’s really cool.”

The Corbins will play smaller percussion instruments, including claves — two short wooden sticks that make a clicking sound when struck — on “Juramento” (“Oath”), in an arrangement by Cuban composer Electo Silva. “Juramento” is a bolero, a form that developed in eastern Cuba and is now considered the archetypal romantic song of Latin America.

You’ll want to keep your eyes and ears on the sopranos during “El Guayaboso” (“The Liar”), by another Cuban composer, Guido López-Gavilán. It’s about a Hispanic Pinocchio type, telling bigger and bigger lies, set to hard-driving rhythms, with voices imitating instruments, and the sopranos channeling their inner Keith Moons for a virtuosic drum solo near the end.

A commissioned world premiere is the centerpiece of the Cantos y Cuentos program. Tenor, composer, and conductor Ernesto Herrera was born in Havana in 1988. Two of his primary passions, sacred choral music and contemporary Latin rhythms, are reflected in his Dos Salmos para el Alma (Two Psalms for the Soul).

Habermann describes the first section, “No Te Apartes de Mí” (“Don’t Leave Me”), as composed in the “beautiful, big, plush writing” that’s common to much choral music today. The second section, “Psalm 150,” is particularly notable for its syncopations drawn from Afro-Cuban music.

The chorale’s recent string of new works is the product of its commissioning club, a group of donors with an unusual degree of freedom in choosing a composer.

Each year Habermann gives the members a list of composers to choose from, along with listening samples for all of them, and the club makes its choice from the roster. (If you’d like to feel like a post-modern Medici, the chorale will be happy to elevate your station.)

The legendary New Mexico singer-composer-guitarist Nacha Mendez joins the chorale for a three-song finale, starting with Ernesto Lecuona’s “Malagueña.” It was originally part of his Suite Andalucía from 1933; Lecuona later added lyrics and published it separately.

That’s followed by “La Llorona,” the traditional Mexican song about a weeping woman looking for her lost children, and by José López Alavez’s “Canción Mixteca,” written during the 1910s to express his homesickness at having left his native Oaxaca for Mexico City.

A free Q&A with Herrera, Mendez, and Habermann follows the July 26 performance at 2:30 p.m. Advance registration can be made at desertchorale .org/tickets.

Around July 8, pre-concert video lectures for the chorale’s three summer programs will be available at the same website url.