By Patrick Neas, KC Arts Beat | October 31, 2025
Liber Divinorum Operum, or the Universal Man Illumination by St. Hildegard of Bingen
Oh, how miraculous is the foreknowing of the Holy Heart, which anticipated creation.
For when God looked upon the face of the human he created, he saw fulfilled all of his works.
O quam mirabilis, St. Hildegard of Bingen’s hymn of cosmic harmony, will open Vision of Peace, a concert by the William Baker Festival Singers at 3 p.m. Nov. 2 at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. Other composers featured on the program include Jean Berger, Samuel Barber, Anton Bruckner, Felix Mendelssohn and the Festival Singers’ composer-in-residence, Sean Sweeden.
The concert centers around the theme of peace. But Baker at first was hesitant to address this well-worn subject.
“I try to come up with a theme for our season every year, and what kept resonating in my mind was peace,” Baker said. “It had nothing to do with anything going on in the world, except it just floated in my head. And I’m going to tell you, I rejected it. I said, OK, I’m not going to do peace. Everybody does peace. Who in this world is not interested in peace? I did not want to be put in that niche or that pigeonhole, but it kept coming back to me and coming back to me and coming back to me.”
Baker says that when he heard Vox Venti, a Chicago choir which is part of Baker’s Choral Foundation, perform Hildegard’s O Quam Mirabilis that a concept of peace beyond the usual clichés opened up for him.
“That got me thinking,” Baker said. “Peace is something that was intended for us by our very creation. Peace was created in us and we have rejected it, but we have an opportunity to come back. We can find peace in our daily lives, in the sleeping of a child, the beauty of the ocean. When I’m sitting out on the back porch with a glass of wine, looking through the trees in my backyard at the blue Kansas sky, my spirit is serene. So all of this started kicking around, and in 30 minutes, I had the program.”
The concert will open with the women of the Festival Singers performing O Quam Mirabilis (“O How Miraculous”) by the 10th-century abbess and visionary St. Hildegard of Bingen, and that will be followed by Vision of Peace by Jean Berger.
“Berger was Jewish and was born in 1909 in Westphalia,” Baker said. “When the Nazis began persecuting Jews, he first went to Paris and then he escaped the Nazis again in Paris and fled to Rio de Janeiro, where he did a number of pieces in Portuguese. One of his great pieces is called Brazilian Psalm. The Alleluia from it is a choral staple. Finally, he found his way to the United States during World War II. He joined the American army during the war, and then he became an American citizen before the end of the war. He was always an anti-war person, and his Vision of Peace is considered one of his great anti-war statements.”
Jean Berger
Dr. William O. Baker
The choir will then perform three 19th-century hymns Baker is particularly fond of: Come, Ye Disconsolate, which will be sung by the men of the Festival Singers, Pensive Dove, and Morning Trumpet. Pensive Dove is an Early American Sacred Harp hymn, popular in New England and among Southern revivalists. Baker, a native of Atlanta, has a special feeling for the Sacred Harp repertoire.
“I have never done Pensive Dove before,” Baker said. “There were people in the Festival Singers who said, ‘We can’t believe there’s a Sacred Harp hymn you haven’t done before.’ But I haven’t. It’s very Victorian in its language, the image of the dove seeking peace where pleasure holds her reign. “But then I saw it in vain. I sought the peaceful dove in the rosy bower. I knew her tender heart. I sought her in the bower of love. But she had flown that peaceful dove, felt the traitor’s dart. And then in sweet religion’s humble cot, she built her downy nest to seek that sweet secluded spot and win peace to my breast.”
Page 52 from The Sacred Harp, fourth edition (1870), showing the four-shape notation and the traditional oblong layout
Baker will then hand the baton to Christine Freeman, the Festival Singers’ associate music director, who will conduct works by two great 19th-century composers, Anton Bruckner and Felix Mendelssohn. The first is Bruckner’s Virga Jesse (“The branch of Jesse has blossomed”), a hymn often associated with Advent.
Bruckner was aligned with the Cecelia Movement, which sought to revive Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony in Catholic music. Virga Jesse exemplifies this ideal while embracing Romantic color. The motet builds to a powerful climax on the phrase pacem Deus reddidit (“God has restored peace”), followed by a serene and luminous Alleluia.
Felix Mendelssohn’s Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich (“Grant Us Peace Graciously”), composed in 1831, is a short but deeply expressive chorale cantata for choir and orchestra, setting Martin Luther’s German paraphrase of the Latin prayer Da pacem Domine.
The hymn was written in 1831 when Europe was torn by war and conflict, and may have been a spiritual response to the tensions of the time. It reflects Mendelssohn’s reverence for Johann Sebastian Bach, combining Baroque clarity with Romantic warmth. It’s structured as a single movement, with a calm, prayerful tone throughout.
Anton Bruckner
Christine Freeman, MME
Felix Mendelssohn
One of the admirable things about Baker and his ensemble is their commitment to commissioning new music. They’ll perform two works by the 39-year-old composer Daniel Elder: Ballade to the Moon and Lullaby.
“Elder is a native of Atlanta,” Baker said.” He did his undergraduate at my alma mater, the University of Georgia and did his master’s at the Westminster Choir College. His music is so well-regarded that the great Westminster Choir did an entire album of his pieces. I think the only other composer that got an entire album of pieces before Elder by the Westminster Choir was Bach. So that puts him in high company.”
The Festival Singers' commitment to new music is so strong that since the late 1980s, they have had a composer-in-residence. They will perform music by their current and fourth composer-in-residence, Sean Sweeden.
“Dr. Sweden is a wonderful countertenor and a brilliant percussionist,” Baker said. “He’s written some wonderful music for us since his appointment in February. One of the two pieces that we’ll sing on Sunday is an arrangement that he did of Over the Rainbow. It’s just absolutely, heartbreakingly beautiful. Somewhere over the rainbow, there’s a land I heard of in a lullaby. The dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
Daniel Elder
Dr. Sean Sweenden
The program also includes works by three modern composers: Agnus Dei, Samuel Barber’s choral setting of his gorgeous and extremely popular Adagio for Strings, Ubi Caritas by René Clausen, and The Lord is the Everlasting God by Kenneth Jennings.
“I have about five or six settings of the Ubi Caritas, and my favorite of the five is whichever one I’m doing at the time,” Baker said. “But I think René Clausen’s setting, which has a little bit more of the text, has got to be one of the most beautiful and one of the most compelling. Where charity and love are, God is there. Let us keep our minds free of division. May there be an end to malice and strife and quarrels.
The concert will end with gospel spirituals, a Festival Singers specialty: Alice Parker’s settings of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child and Deep River and Robert Ray’s He Never Failed Me Yet.
“What can be more about peace than Deep River, the promised land where all is peace,” Baker said.
“The Festival Singers have had two appearances so far this season, and the group is off to a great start. They have been quick in rehearsals. They have, just out of the gate, a level of nuance and familiarity with the music. They’ve always been a strong group, but this year they are really out of the gate, running fast. I am totally stoked about this concert.”
Vision of Peace
Presented by the William Baker Festival Singers
3 p.m. Nov. 2 at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, 1307 Holmes. $23.18 to $28.52 Tickets Available at the door or at www.festivalsingers.org
The William Baker Festival Singers at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
