Boston Classical Review

Soprano Jekalyn Carr was among the soloists in Carlos Simon’s Good News Mass with Thomas Wilkins conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thursday night. Photo: Winslow Townson

“I hate quotation,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. “Tell me what you know.”

Well, there’s no question that Carlos Simon knows the charismatic black church. The son of a preacher, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s composer chair has long discussed his heritage and periodically referenced it in his output. But it wasn’t until Thursday night’s local premiere of his Good News Mass at Symphony Hall that all the spoken and musical elements fell into place—quite literally, as things turned out.

The occasion was the final installment of the BSO’s month-long “E Pluribus Unum” festival. Though its offerings have been haphazard and hardly comprehensive, the jubilee has launched the orchestra and its audience into the New Year with a bracing dose of the unfamiliar.

This week’s program was no different, taking a look at that most defining American trait, religious faith, with a pair of virtually brand-new scores by Simon and David Lang. Unusually, the duology called for a pair of conductors, Thomas Wilkins leading the former and Donald Nally directing his choir, The Crossing, in excerpts from Lang’s poor hymnal.

Of the two, the Good News Mass, which was co-commissioned by the BSO and premiered in Los Angeles in April 2025, is the more expansive and ambitious, calling for soloists, chorus, orchestra, spoken word artist, and video projections.

Simon, in his introduction to the performance, described it as the piece he’d been wanting to write all his life, and the composer’s easy familiarity with the ebb and flow of black sacred music was impossible to miss. So, too, his thoroughgoing, deeply personal integration of various musical traditions that have emerged out of the African-American experience—including gospel, soul, hip-hop, jazz, and the blues—with the Western symphonic repertoire.

Any printed suggestions, however, that the effort was a sort of fusion between Pentecostal and Catholic traditions fell flat: the Roman rite is far more tightly structured. In this score, a more sectionalized format reigns, ranging from a time for confession and thanksgiving to a closing affirmation of faith.

Melvin Crispell III, Jekalyn Carr, and Zebulon Ellis were the soloists with Marc Bamuthi Joseph the librettist and speaker (right), in Carlos Simon’s Good News Mass with the BSO Thursday night. Photo: Winslow Townson

But whatever this Mass lacks in liturgical rigor, it compensates for with sheer fervency. There was no shortage of the last, especially from the night’s excellent trio of soloists, soprano Jekalyn Carr, alto Melvin Crispell III, and tenor Zebulon Ellis. Ellis, in particular, floated the eye-popping, stratospheric melismas of his part—notably in “Lord, I Believe”—with impossible ease.

The Good News Mass Gospel Chorus, prepared by Dennis Slaughter, sang with a zest and crisp diction that made up for moments of spotty intonation and an occasional lack of heft: the group periodically sounded like they were singing from a further distance than just the back of Symphony Hall’s stage.

Perhaps some of their sound was swallowed by the big screen hanging down over them. One could have done without that—and Melina Matsoukas’ visuals which, some striking images aside (urban scenes and a young girl doing a headstand on a pile of books among them), proved more arbitrary and distracting than not.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph did double-duty as the Mass’s librettist and spoken word artist. On Thursday, he was an electrifying presence, even as his text mixed a verbal dexterity that grew somewhat overwhelming as the night proceeded—“The God of contradiction/the metaphysical, the mysterious/the unknowable, the ephemeral non fiction” ran one line near the end—with moments of subversive insight: “Thank you to the dangerous authors/who presently know that a book can’t be banned/if it wasn’t published in the first place.”

Wilkins presided over the whole undertaking with a clear beat and a strong sense of how to pace the larger work. Trombonist Toby Oft’s Dixieland-worthy solos in the “Meditation on Faith” were one of the night’s instrumental highlights. Even so, balances between strings and brasses were a bit touch-and-go and the night’s use of amplification didn’t always feel settled. Though the score’s big numbers—including “Save Me, Lord,” “Oh, Give Thanks,” and “Cry Holy”—were all well-balanced and fluent, other sections (like the Introduction and much of the underscoring for the narration) were less well-defined.

Nevertheless, this Good News Mass added up to the sum of its many moving parts.

Simon, who anchored the proceedings from a Hammond organ in the middle of the stage, has crafted a work that only a lifetime of love for, experience in, and understanding of the church can explain. While it’s not rare for an artist to express who they are and where they’re from, it is less common for such a statement to ring as openly and accessibly in the concert hall as this one does. Whether or not the Mass converts any souls is beside the point; on Thursday, it offered an unalloyed celebration of the better aspects of religious belief.

Donald Nally conducted The Crossing in David Lang’s poor hymnal Thursday night. Photo: Winslow Townson

Lang’s poor hymnal, on the other hand, was written to counter what the composer describes as our day’s “crisis of compassion.” Premiered by Nally and The Crossing in 2023, it paraphrases biblical texts as well as lines from the Passover Haggadah, Tolstoy, Elizabeth Warren, and others in an effort to encourage hearers to rethink what it means to “love thy neighbor.”

Somehow, those disparate sources hold together. Rarely rising above a prayerful hush, the score is often hypnotic. “open your hands” evokes the Holy Minimalism of Arvo Pärt while “I know I should” seems to channel, after a fashion, a chorale. Though its tonal and textural sameness becomes a bit wearing, poor hymnal’s subtleties—particularly the several juxtapositions of an individual against an almost overwhelming collective—are striking.

Thursday’s a cappella performance from the Philadelphia-based The Crossing was outstanding. For tonal blend, diction, and intonation, Nally has created a group that is virtually flawless and Lang, who has written several works for them over the years, understands how to draw out their best. 

So potent was their illumination of poor hymnal’s message, in fact, that one could even look charitably on the night’s fidgety audience and excuse the ubiquitous cell phone that went off in the middle of one of the work’s early devotional moments.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Hall. bso.org

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