BY TERESE LOEB KREUZER | A bastion of church music in Lower Manhattan, the list of Trinity Wall Street’s programming could formerly fit into one chalice: five evening concerts at Trinity Church between October and May, Sunday services and a sprinkling of midday concerts at Trinity (at Broadway and Wall Street) and its satellite, St. Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Fulton. But since Julian Wachner, who just turned 42, arrived a year ago with the title Director of Music and the Arts, that cup runneth over.
This year’s catalogue of Trinity Wall Street’s 2011-12 season is 40 pages long. Handel’s “Messiah” is a holdover from the old scheduling as are Thursday concerts at 1 p.m. that bring a variety of music and instrumentalists to Trinity Church, but much else is new. Wachner’s innovations include several multi-day festivals, Monday afternoon Bach performances in St. Paul’s by the Trinity Choir and Trinity Baroque Orchestra and candle-lit Compline services of modern music in St. Paul’s at 8 p.m. on Sundays.
“It’s very expensive for the professional choir and orchestra to put on a concert, so I restructured the budget,” Wachner explained. “I thought if we were to do a series of midday events with the Trinity Choir and Baroque Orchestra, we could probably do about eight of those for the cost of one evening concert and reach a wider audience and serve the purpose not only of providing beautiful music to Lower Manhattan, but also of touching people who are visiting. When I walked into St. Paul’s Chapel at one o’clock on a Monday, I saw there were already several hundred people walking around in there. So I proposed that we do Bach at One, and the powers that be said, ‘let’s give it a try.’ Within the first week, it was crazy successful. It’s a reallocation of resources.”
Wachner said that Trinity’s “Messiah” was a keeper because it had always sold well. This year in December, it will be performed twice at Trinity Church and once at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center — another innovation. “The product here is so good, but I think the rest of the city doesn’t quite know what it is,” Wachner said, explaining the outing at Alice Tully.
Though the schedule includes the work of many old masters such as Handel and Bach, Wachner, who is himself a composer as well as a conductor, is very interested in new music and in bringing contemporary music to the attention of a wider audience. On Friday, Oct. 14, for instance, he conducted “Songs for Eve” by Alice Parker at Trinity. Parker was an associate of Robert Shaw’s and a force in the evolution of church choral music. Her full-length work for string quartet and vocal quartet was a touching meditation on what it means to be human, and aware. A cycle of poems by Archibald MacLeish, mostly from Eve’s point of view, provided the narrative. Parker, who is 85, was there to receive the audience’s applause.
Between May 24 and June 3, 2012, Trinity will be presenting a Festival of New Music that will be performed at Trinity, St. Paul’s and at Carnegie Hall. It will include symposia and two operas. Some events will be ticketed and some, free.
Another innovation this year, said Wachner, is that on Nov. 21 and 22, “We are presenting Tenet, which is one of New York’s leading early music groups.” This will be the first time that Trinity has presented the work of another arts organization.
Over the Christmas/New Year holiday, Wachner plans a Twelfth Night festival of early music that will include the Trinity Baroque Orchestra and Trinity Choir performing Bach’s massive “Christmas Oratorio” also with performances by other music groups interspersed into the ambitious schedule.
What might seem like a full-time job for someone less energetic actually takes only part of Wachner’s time. He just signed a five-year contract with the Washington Chorus and has a major piece called “Come, My Dark-Eyed One” that will be performed at the Kennedy Center in November. “It’s a secular piece for big chorus and big orchestra and soprano and bass soloists,” he said. “My music is being performed all over now, which is great.”
Wachner lives in an apartment near St. Paul’s Chapel, chosen in part because it enables him to get to his New York conducting appointments easily and then get to Penn Station, where he catches the train to Washington.
He was born in California to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, (his mother, a concert pianist, still lives there), grew up in New York City, where he sang with the choir of St. Thomas Church and became an Episcopalian, and went to college at Boston University, where, at the age of 20, he became director of the music program at the Methodist chapel. For 10 years, he taught at McGill University in Montreal. A tenured professor, he is still technically on the faculty there — on an unpaid leave of absence.
He says that he is able to juggle his complicated life because he has “a very good support staff.”
At the moment, he just has one apartment — the one in Manhattan — though he contemplates getting another one in Washington. “I feel like I’ve come home here,” he said. “Most of my good friends are still in Montreal, but I also have a lot of good friends in Boston. Facebook is an amazing thing because you can maintain these virtual relationships with people. So much of my life has been spent on the road that just being able to be settled in one place feels kind of wonderful.”
