We warmly invite you to “Would You Harbor Me?”, our opening concert of the 2025-26 season, a program of music for choir and strings under the baton of Arianne Abela. Please join us on Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 2:30 pm at Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst. Tickets are available on a sliding scale from illuminechoir.org, Ticket Tailor, or at the door.
Named for a song by Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Would You Harbor Me?” explores displacement and the quest for refuge, the longing for safety and the requirement of compassion, through music ranging from the Baroque to the contemporary, and from the Old World to the new.
Anchoring the program will be Ad Manus, a movement from Dieterich Buxtehude’s masterpiece Membra Jesu Nostri, together with the striking “To the Hands,” the acclaimed response by Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary composer Caroline Shaw. Buxtehude’s music contemplates the wounds Jesus suffered in crucifixion, asking “What are those wounds in your hands?” Shaw broadens the scope of this question to include the suffering of refugees and people in crisis, and recasts the question finally as “What are these wounds in the midst of our hands?”
The concert will close with two settings of the theme from Finlandia: the familiar hymn tune, which the audience will be invited to sing with us; and an arrangement by Blake Morgan, composed for his ensemble Voces8.
After the concert, please join us for a reception and a small showing of photographed details from works by local sculptor Harriet Diamond. Diamond has addressed the suffering of refugees displaced by war and climate destabilization in panoramas both sweeping and eloquently detailed. You can see a small sample of her art in the header above. We are grateful for her permission to highlight her work in connection with our concert.
Throughout this season, we will be engaged in a series of collaborations, about which you may learn more on our website. On November 2, we perform in a concert sponsored by the Western Massachusetts branch of the American Guild of Organists, combining with other area choirs to sing the Duruflé Requiem, and individually performing a beautiful work by Jonathan Dove. In March we will join forces with the Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus to present Vaughan Williams’ great anti-war cantata Dona Nobis Pacem. Our season concludes in May with the Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil, featuring the extraordinary basso-profundo Glenn Miller, whose sonorous low notes grounded our recent performance of Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles.
We appreciate your continued support. It is good to join hands and voices.
Also check out other Entertainment events in Amherst, Music events in Amherst, Concerts in Amherst.
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