Although it’s hardly as old as the city’s venerable Mendelssohn Club Chorus, Philadelphia’s Singing City choir traces its lineage all the way back to 1948. Like the Mendelssohn Chorus, it, too, isn’t wasting its time looking backward but, instead, is looking forward. With a new executive director, Michael Bolton, the choir is preparing the opening concert of its 2025-26 season.

That concert, carrying the moniker, “Democracy in Song, Part II: American Voices,” is set for Sunday, Oct. 26, at 3 p.m. at Friends Center’s Race Street Room, 1501 Cherry St. in Center City. The concert will be conducted by Rollo Dilworth.

Elaine Brown founded Singing City in Philadelphia in 1948 as an integrated choir, born out of the 1940s “Fellowship House” movement. It held that ordinary people coming together in shared activities could bridge differences between races, religions, and cultures. Now in its 76th season, Singing City has maintained a singular focus – that of uniting people through music. The choir fulfills its mission through formal and informal concerts, and choral music education and performances for youths, including its Teen Voices of the City Ensemble.

Executive Director Bolton has said, “I’ve been blown away by this passionate community of voices ranging in age from 21 to 93. Our singers come from all walks of life and truly believe in our mission to bring people together through vocal music.”

Regarding the theme of the program, he added, “I’ve been especially inspired by the words of [Herbert Haslam], one of the founders of Singing City in 1948 who said, ‘Democracy is not something we have. It’s something we make, together.’”

“This is music that doesn’t shy away from complexity,” explained Rollo Dilworth, the choir’s artistic and music director. “It invites us to engage with America’s unfinished story and challenges us to imagine a more just and inclusive future.”

Tickets are available at singingcity.org.

Piffaro on the Hill

Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, opened its 2025-26 season with the most entertaining “show and tell” I’ve experienced in concert. The program was entitled “Tools of the Trade: Exploring the Renaissance Musicians’ Arsenal” and it was played before a full house Saturday evening in The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill.

A cornucopia of wind instruments was brought to the fore to take part in performances of a plethora of scores composed by a host of Renaissance musicians, all of whom spoke musically in their own particular style. The result was a concert that was equally entertaining and informative.

And, of course, it was played with technical mastery, stylish panache, and interpretive spontaneity that I suspect was the hallmark of music making in the “good old days” when improvisation was an essential talent for a musician.

Grand Return

The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia made its “grand return” to the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square in Center City, Sunday, Oct. 12, playing a program comprised of Adolphus Hailstork’s “Lachrymosa: 1919,” Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor with Henry Kramer as soloist, and Symphony No. 1 in C minor, also by Mendelssohn. The concert – well attended by an enthusiastic audience – was conducted by David Hayes, the Chamber Orchestra’s music director.

The ensemble’s “grand return” to Holy Trinity was necessitated by the financial impossibility of its continuing to perform in the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater. The Perelman’s small number of seats – 600 instead of the originally hoped for 1,000 – and the Kimmel’s small endowment, which doesn’t help defray some of the rental fees – have come home to roost and made the Perelman, especially, a financial liability to rent. Even the “prestige” of performing in the Kimmel Center can’t compensate for bankruptcy.

Pianist Kramer proved himself an exhilarating soloist in the Mendelssohn Concerto. His fleet fingers dashed across the keys of a stunning Steinway & Sons concert grand piano. He caught the high drama of the first movement, the lyricism of the second, and the exuberance of the third. The only disappointment was that he didn’t play an encore.

Hayes led a spirited interpretation of the First Symphony. Mendelssohn’s gift for flowing melodies, transparent textures, easygoing classical development, and a light touch with fugal counterpoint played perfectly into Hayes’ buoyant interpretive style.

Curtis Symphony

I must confess that I was terribly disappointed to have learned earlier in the week that Christoph Eschenbach had taken ill and was not going to conduct the Curtis Symphony Orchestra in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor. Bruckner is not only an acquired taste for audiences, but conducting his music is a hard-earned talent for even the most profound maestros of the podium. No glib showing off will do with a Bruckner symphony. You either feel the composer’s deep spiritual depths or you can’t rise to his ecstatic heights.

Eschenbach, a former music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, is one of those rare musicians who can do both, a pair of talents most especially needed to conduct an orchestra whose average age is no more than 20 years old.

And yet, James Ross (Curtis class of 1989) elicited not only the technical gloss of perfection that is the common coinage of every Curtis Symphony concert I’ve ever heard, but also the dark hues of emotion so much a part of Bruckner’s unique combination of Brahms’ classical mastery and Wagner’s soaring romanticism – but also of Bach’s peerless polyphonic counterpoint.

You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net.