Reena Esmail’s The Tipping Point from 2021 is a challenging and rewarding piece that used aspects of Indian classical music, including a tabla player and traditional vocal scales, to look forward to the end of the pandemic. Caminante (Traveler) by Jocelyn Hagen also made use of multicultural aspects, in this case Spanish and English texts, in an equally effective manner.

“Sweet Rivers,” by Shawn Kirchner, is a neo-Romantic setting of a poem by John Granade, a Methodist preacher and poet active circa 1800 in Tennessee. Its speaker looks forward to the glories of life everlasting, in music of an inescapably uplifting, Hollywoodesque nature.

The six movements of The American Road draw from spirituals, hymns, and gospel music, including “Shall We Gather at the River” and “This Little Light of Mine” with texts set in a variety of evocative and effective manners.

Mass for the Endangered

The Santa Fe Desert Chorale’s fiscal health has yielded benefits in its artistic ambition. The second program in its 2025 summer season featured two longer works, both accompanied by chamber orchestra, which would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

The first was Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands, from 2016. Its starting point is Dietrich Buxtehude’s cantata Membra Jesu Nostri. Then, as the composer writes, “It expands and colors and breaks this language [to consider] the suffering of those around the world seeking refuge and of our role and responsibilities in these crises.”

It’s a sadly timely message, and the chorale’s performance of this impressive piece was first rate, as was that of the accompanying string quintet.

Sarah Kirkland Snider describes her Mass for the Endangered as taking “the Mass’ musical modes of spiritual contemplation and applying them to concern for non-human life — animals, plants, and the environment.”

Her orchestration adds three winds, harp, piano, and percussion to the string quintet, generating many intriguing sonorities and harmonies, but also making good balances with the singers harder to achieve.

In addition, her text is extremely long and often densely poetic. Here’s a sample stanza:

Sea of cradle, foundling,

current, cold and quelled as morning.

Braid of vapored ashes,

shadowed creche, collapsing.

Not much of it was repeated (a technique often used by Shaw in her vocal works), which, when combined with the cathedral basilica’s resonant acoustics, made verbal comprehension an endangered species as well. This is not a criticism of the chorale, which sang very well, with impressive dynamics and often-lovely vocal colors, but a continuing challenge with much contemporary vocal music in this venue.