St. Tikhon Choir to perform Benedict Sheehan’s Composition of “The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom” in New York and Washington, D.C.
The Saint Tikhon Choir, the professional vocal ensemble of St. Tikhon’s Monastery, will give a series of performances of Benedict Sheehan’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in New York and Washington this coming October, under the direction of the composer.
The group gave the world premiere performance of Sheehan’s groundbreaking new work—commissioned in 2016 by the PaTRAM Institute—over the 2019 Memorial Day weekend, to great acclaim. His Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon, who spoke at the end of the premiere, called the Liturgy “a milestone for Orthodox music in America.” Archimandrite Alexis Trader, in his reflection on the concert for Orthodox Arts Journal, wrote further that, “I have never experienced anything so breathtakingly beautiful, so transparently luminous, so close to that border between heaven and earth as the premiere performance of Benedict Sheehan’s Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom... the bar for Orthodox liturgical music in the English-speaking world has now been set, definitively.”
The concert series will begin at 7:00 PM on Friday, October 18, at the Church of St. John Nepomucene in New York. The series will continue in Washington, DC on Saturday, October 19, with a second concert performance of Sheehan’s Liturgy at 8:00 PM at St. Peter’s Church on Capitol Hill.
Advance tickets to the concerts are available online at stspress.com. For more information, call St. Tikhon’s Bookstore at 888-454-6678.
The series will culminate on Sunday morning, October 20, at 10:00 AM with the celebration of the Divine Liturgy by His Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon at St. Nicholas Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The responses of the Divine Liturgy will be comprised of Sheehan’s composition and will be sung by the Saint Tikhon Choir, joined by members of the St. Nicholas Cathedral Choir. The Divine Liturgy is open to the public.
Please click below to view a portion of the Memorial Day weekend concert.