About the Concert:

The Reverend Walter Hussey reimagined the church as a place of living artistic creation, commissioning work from major figures in both music and visual art, including Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Chagall, and Henry Moore. Early in his career, he commissioned Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb; toward its close, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. Framed by those two landmark works, the Back Bay Chorale opens its season with the world premiere of Zachary Wadsworth’s De Profundis, a setting of texts by an imprisoned Oscar Wilde composed as a modern analogue to Rejoice in the Lamb.

About the composer Zachary Wadsworth:

Zachary Wadsworthis a composer of  “fresh, deeply felt and strikingly original” music (Washington Post), with regular performances and premieres around the world. His compositions have been heard at the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Center, and Tokyo’s Takinogawa Hall, and they have been performed by such ensembles as the choir of Westminster Abbey, the Yale Philharmonia, the Swedish Chamber Choir, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Richmond Symphony. As the 2012-13 fellow of the Douglas Moore Foundation for American Opera, Wadsworth was in residence at the Metropolitan Opera and the Santa Fe Opera. 2014 marked his Carnegie Hall debut, and 2015 marked his debut at the National Opera Center. Winner of an international competition chaired by James MacMillan, Wadsworth’s anthem Out of the South Cometh the Whirlwind was performed at Westminster Abbey in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II. Other recent honors include awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, and the American Composers Forum. Wadsworth’s music is widely broadcast and distributed, with recent publications by Novello, G. Schirmer, and E.C. Schirmer, and airings on NPR, BBC, and CBC. Wadsworth earned graduate degrees from Cornell University (DMA) and Yale University (MM), and is an honors graduate of the Eastman School of Music (BM). Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Wadsworth (b. 1983) is now Assistant Professor of Music at Williams College. He previously taught at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.