Welcome to the WVC 2024-25 Season
Our 2024-25 season, starting in December, includes three concerts at our home at Judson Memorial Church!
Unless otherwise noted, concerts and events take place at (or start from) Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South (at Thompson Street), NYC. Accessible entrance is available around the corner at 243 Thompson Street.
Requiem
Saturday, March 22, 2025 at 5:00pm
Advance Tickets: $30 General / $20 Student
At the Door: $35 General / $25 Student
Advance purchase is strongly recommended.
Sonya Headlam, Soprano
Justin Beck, Bass-Baritone
Requiem creates a dialog between two pieces for chorus and orchestra: the beloved Requiem of Gabriel Fauré and Seven Last Words of the Unarmed a recent (contemporary) work by Joel Thompson (b. 1988). Thompson’s work adapts the traditional setting the “Seven Last Words from the Cross” to explore the tragedy and complex emotions of the final words of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and four other Black men whose untimely death came at the hands of those sworn to protect and serve. Fauré’s Requiem—long a staple of choral repertoire—provides the counterpoint with its focus on eternal rest and consolation.
Accompanied by string quartet and piano, the movements of Seven Last Words vary in style, from an intense Bach-inspired fugue to lush Romantic Brahmsian harmonies, to 20th century musical theater. At-times soaring orchestral textures are alternately in tension with the speakers’ agitated, angry and disbelieving words, or characteristic of the hopefulness for the future destroyed by the speaker’s untimely death. In contrast, Faure’s Requiem is, in the composer’s own words, “dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest,” and that it “does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.”
We hope you will be able to join us for this incredibly moving program.
Transatlantic
Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 5:00pm
Our final concert of the 2024-2025 season draws on music from the old and new worlds, acknowledging the impact of European colonialism on Latin American choral music and celebrating the musical heritage of spirituals and gospel music in North America. This concert features compositions by underrepresented Renaissance and 20th century composers—including Modesta Bor, José Maurício Nunes Garcia, Vincente Lusitano, and Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla—contemporary American composers Arianne Abela, Jake Runestad, and Brandon Williams, and spiritual arrangements by Marques Garrett, Jester Hairston, and Moses Hogan.
Previously this Season:
Holiday Concert: Dwell In Unity
Friday, December 20th, 2024 at 7:30pm
Join the West Village Chorale for our annual holiday concert, which this year will focus on themes of unity and peace. In addition to works by Abbie Betinis, Leonard Bernstein, Mark Miller, and Zanaida Stewart Robles, the centerpiece for this concert will be Margaret Burk’s This Holy Hour for harp and chorus, a gorgeous modern-day take on the Ceremony of Carols featuring new imaginings of traditional carols and new poetry by Charles Anthony Silverstri.