Welcome to the WVC 2025-26 Season
Our 2025-26 season, starting in November, includes three concerts at our home at Judson Memorial Church and a collaboration with the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra uptown at Symphony Space!
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.
Our 2025-26 Season:
Ode to Joy: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
…in which we partner with the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra to celebrate their 50th anniversary under the baton of conductor Matthew Oberstein. (Welcome to the half-century Club, die Freunde!)
Friday, November 14th at 8:00 PM
Symphony Space
2537 Broadway at 95th Street, NYC
Advance tickets are available online now, or in person at the Symphony Space box office!
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is one of the highlights of 19th century choral music, featuring some of the composer’s best-known melodies, with a text by Friedrich Schiller that expresses a hope for a time when all people will be united by joy (Freude!).
Joining the nearly one hundred fifty musicians of our two groups will be soloists Michelle Travato, soprano; Lucia Bradford, mezzo-soprano; Nicholas Simpson, tenor; and Eric Luis Viñas, baritone.
Discount Advance Tickets can be purchased for $27 via PayPal up until noon on the day of the concert (a savings of $5 off the Box Office General Admission Price.)
Holiday Concert: Northern Lights
Sunday, December 14th
5:00 PM
Advance tickets are available online now ($30 general admission / $20 student); remaining tickets will be available at the door ($35 general/$25 student)
**Advance purchase is strongly recommended, as our concerts regularly sell out!**
As the days grow shorter and winter approaches, this year’s holiday concert focuses on light—sparkling in the heavens, shimmering on the horizon, and shining from the candles that are part of so many traditions. Northern Lights spans the centuries—from seventh-century chant to beloved traditional carols to contemporary works by living composers, including Ēriks Ešenvalds, Ola Gjeilo, Elaine Hagenberg, Cecilia McDowall, and Eric Whitacre.
All Aboard: Conductor’s Choice
Sunday, March 15, 2026
5:00 PM
This Land is Your Land
Sunday, May 17, 2026
5:00 PM
Previously, our 2024-25 Season:
Transatlantic
Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 5:00pm
Our final concert of the season, Transatlantic, journeys from the sacred cathedrals of Europe to Latin America, featuring stirring works by composers who adapted and transformed European music into something uniquely their own.
From our own shores, we celebrate the powerful traditions of spirituals and gospel music. Born from suffering, hope, and unbreakable spirit, these songs have become cornerstones of American musical heritage—testaments to the strength and soul of the communities that created them.
Transatlantic features compositions by underrepresented Renaissance and 20th century composers—including Modesta Bor, José Maurício Nunes Garcia, 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.
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.
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.