The Clarion Choir & The Clarion Orchestra premiere a new sacred work by young American composer Alistair Coleman alongside J.S. Bach’s Magnificat. Coleman is a doctoral fellow at Princeton University and serves on the composition faculty of the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia. Knowing that the second half of the concert would be Bach’s beloved Magnificat, Coleman cleverly devised a work that sets to music the other parts of the traditional Vespers service that are traditionally sung alongside the Magnificat. He honed in specifically on the Nunc Dimittis prayer, in which the elderly St. Simeon, who had been promised that he would see the Messiah before dying, holds the baby Jesus and declares that he may now “depart this world in peace.”

This concert continues The Clarion Choir & Orchestra’s mutli-year project to perform Bach’s complete large-scale oratorios, a series that will continue with the ensemble’s performance in the spring of 2027 with the Easter Oratorio (below).

The Clarion Choir
The Clarion Orchestra
Steven Fox, conductor