[photo credit: Los Angeles Master Chorale]
The concert, titled “This Shining Night,” is part of the Master Chorale’s Sacred Spaces community series, which debuted at St. Andrew in April 2025 and returns to the Raymond Avenue church with an entirely new program. Led by Associate Artistic Director Jenny Wong, the evening features works by contemporary choral composers Eric Whitacre, Reena Esmail, Shawn Kirchner and Morten Lauridsen alongside pieces by Renaissance composer William Byrd and modern composers Michael Abels and Jennifer Lucy Cook.
The program places composers who are reshaping choral music today beside a figure who helped define it more than 400 years ago. Whitacre is a Grammy winner. Esmail, the Master Chorale’s Swan Family Artist-in-Residence, draws on both Indian and Western classical traditions. Lauridsen served as the Master Chorale’s composer-in-residence from 1994 to 2001 and is a National Medal of Arts recipient. Kirchner is a Los Angeles-based composer whose arrangements of spirituals are widely performed.
The venue is itself part of the experience. St. Andrew, founded in 1886 as Pasadena’s oldest Catholic parish, occupies a 1927 church designed by architect Ross Montgomery and modeled after two Roman basilicas — Santa Maria in Cosmedin and Santa Sabina. The church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and its Romanesque bell tower is a Pasadena skyline landmark. The building’s interior, with scagliola columns by Italian artisans and murals painted by Venetian master Carlo Wostry, provides an intimate acoustic setting far different from the Master Chorale’s home stage at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The Sacred Spaces series represents part of the Master Chorale’s effort to perform beyond its Downtown Los Angeles home base, according to a press release from the organization. The series launched in spring 2025 with concerts at All Saints’ Beverly Hills and St. Andrew in Pasadena. This year, the Pasadena concert is followed by a Sacred Spaces performance in La Verne on March 21.
“Singing is an art form meant to be shared — it connects us all,” Scott Altman, the Master Chorale’s president and CEO, said during the series’ 2025 launch, according to the Pasadena Outlook.
The Master Chorale, founded in 1964 by conductor Roger Wagner, is a resident company of The Music Center and choir-in-residence at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The ensemble reaches more than 175,000 people annually through its concert series, touring and collaborations with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, according to the organization’s website.
Tickets start at $30 and are available at tickets.lamasterchorale.org. St. Andrew Catholic Church is located at 311 N Raymond Ave., Pasadena. The Master Chorale box office can be reached at 213-972-7282.
Wong, a Hong Kong-born conductor who also serves as chorus director of the San Francisco Symphony, has led the Master Chorale’s chorus preparations for performances with the LA Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel and helped prepare the ensemble for its 2022 Grammy-winning recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, according to the Master Chorale’s website.
