Empire City Men's Chorus Rings in Holiday Season with ABSOLUTE JOY Concert

 Empire City Men’s Chorus, New York City’s vanguard of modern men's choral music, rings in the holiday season with ABSOLUTE JOY, a radiant and revolutionary celebration of light, resistance, and renewal. Performances take place December  5 and 6 at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Chelsea, a venue whose mission of community care and nourishment adds special resonance to a concert centered on generosity of spirit.

Drawing inspiration from the Age of Absolutism, when Baroque masters like Bach navigated the demands of aristocratic control, ABSOLUTE JOY reimagines the sounds of the season as an act of creative and spiritual defiance. Conducted by returning Artistic Director Vince Peterson, the program features the world premiere of a new neo-Baroque work by composer Evan Fein, setting Francisco de Quevedo’s 17th-century satire “Poderoso Caballero es Don Dinero.” The Spanish poet’s sharp critique of money and power, written during the height of aristocratic rule, feels startlingly relevant today. Scored for full Baroque orchestra and men’s chorus in modern tuning, Fein’s work fuses the grandeur of the Baroque style with contemporary urgency, echoing Quevedo’s timeless protest against greed and political oppression.

Peterson's own tenor/bass arrangements of Bach's Christmas Oratorio and Handel's Messiah join music by Charpentier and Mendelssohn, alongside powerful contemporary works that explore joy, hope, and renewal in times of struggle: Joan Szymko's exhilarating A Winter Ride, Edwin Willmington's Refugee King, which reimagines the Holy Family as displaced refugees; Brian Tate's theatrical Run Mary Run; and Dan Forrest’s transcendent setting of civil rights leader Howard Thurman's The Work of Christmas.

Performed with full Baroque orchestra and harpsichord continuo, ABSOLUTE JOY transforms historical oppression into contemporary resistance in a musical declaration that no corrupt leader can extinguish the human spirit’s capacity for transcendent joy.

“Joy is not naïve. It’s radical,” says Artistic Director Vince Peterson. “The music of the Baroque era was born under systems of absolute power, and yet it still sings with humanity and with hope. This concert is about that same spirit of resistance: finding light where others tried to extinguish it—this holiday season and all year long.”