MUSIC
THURSDAY, MAY 17
8:00 PM

Bloch:  Sacred Service/Bernstein:  Chichester Psalms
Voices of Ascension
Church of the Ascension
Fifth Avenue at 10th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan

$10-$85
https://www.voicesofascension.org/3172018-bloch-bernstein/

Ho-hum, yet another performance of Leonard Bernstein's wonderfulChichester Psalms, with which we've been happily inundated in this Bernstein centenary year.  This piece is, to me, one of the Top Two (with a bullet) of Bernstein's classical compositions -- perhaps because it incorporates some pages left over from the Top One of Bernstein's pop compositions, West Side Story.  But that isn't the Big News about the concert.  The Big News is a piece Bernstein memorably conducted, Ernest Bloch's Sacred Service (one hopes in the original version in Hebrew -- to go with the Hebrew Chichester Psalms -- and not the bland alternative English translation) -- which you almost never see performed anywhere.  If you're a Reform Jew -- even (or maybe especially) a lapsed one like me -- it's an inordinately moving experience to hear the familiar text of the Reform Sabbath service set to first-rate music in the Western classical tradition, just like the Bruckner mass setting I'm listening to as I type this (remember that there's no tradition of composed instrumental Jewish liturgical settings because of long-standing religious proscriptions against the use musical instruments during prayer).  So, recommended at least to my co-religionists.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT:  This is most certainly an Old Skool concert, so let's have an Old Skool dinner.  Go to the Knickerbocker and have a caviar pie and a steak.  I guarantee you you won't be sorry:  no one ever is.  Moreover, this place is so Old Skool that they haven't heard that NYC restaurants don't stay open late anymore.