The pandemic unleashed the same kind of destruction on much of the performing arts ecosystem that a wildfire does on a forest. Like animals fleeing an inferno, workers in all sectors of the industry shifted gears and career tracks (some of them permanently). But new growth, however fragile, carries hope and potential.
The Shift Orchestra Project’s debut concert Sunday at Emmanuel Church embodied such new growth. The newborn self-described “musician’s collective,” which is largely made up of local young professional musicians and graduate-level conservatory students, collaborated with the longstanding local vocal ensemble Cappella Clausura to present Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Mass for the Endangered,” a 45-minute piece for chorus and 12 instruments that reimagines the traditional Catholic Mass in honor of the Earth and all its non-human inhabitants.
With the concert beginning at the unorthodox time of 5:30 p.m. (which was then delayed by a few minutes on account of the sparks and smoke at Park Street Station) — the sky clouded over, and the lights in the sanctuary dimmed — the room already had the contemplative feel of an evensong service, if a somewhat surreal one. There was a mobile sculpture of gargantuan fabric flowers dangling from the nave and various person-sized animal puppets scattered throughout the pews, which I later learned were not affiliated with the Shift performance.
The ensemble itself was almost entirely hidden from view throughout the performance by a large projection screen. Earlier this year, I listened with interest to the recording of the piece released on New Amsterdam Records; more recently, I learned that artist Deborah Johnson, also known as CandyStations, had created an animated visual counterpart to the entire piece, but I went in not knowing what to expect.
Based on most of my prior multimedia concert experiences, I wasn’t expecting too much. In the first piece, Sven-David Sandström’s “To see a world” for unaccompanied chorus — which gets where it’s going, which is gorgeous, but takes its time getting there — the visuals were only a sparse field of twinkling white dots on a black background, which looked like a screen saver and very well could have been. I wondered if I might end up closing my eyes for most of the concert.
Five minutes later, I was wishing I didn’t have to blink. Johnson’s visuals were stunning: pulsating, panning, expanding and contracting in concordance with the ebb and flow of the music’s dynamics and textures, conducted with invisible grace by Shift director David Allen Flowers. Slender wireframes and webs onscreen reflected the eerie, shimmering cadences of Yvonne Cox’s solo harp during the “Gloria” movement. In “Sanctus/Benedictus,” the orchestra and chorus flourished like the earth after rain, accompanied by images of constantly shifting rose windows and heavenly visions with angels replaced by animals. I would pay to see this again; I’d pay even more to see it in a space that had the acoustics of Emmanuel Church but the projection facilities of the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science.
The text, which blended the traditional Latin Mass with poetry by Nathaniel Bellows, was hard to understand when sung, and hard to read in the darkness, but I scarcely wished for captions or anything to draw my attention away from the visuals. I was perfectly satisfied to read it after the lights came up. Before that, however, there was an a cappella postlude: Ayanna Woods’s resolute, chantlike “Bound,” which planted the audience back on terra firma as the screen again displayed the generic star field: the same, yet not the same. I, the listener — not the image — had been transformed.
Applause was swift and enthusiastic, even more so after three people hauled the screen away and the audience saw the musicians for the first time — and with any luck, not the last.
THE SHIFT ORCHESTRA PROJECT AND CAPPELLA CLAUSURA
Sept. 11. At Emmanuel Church, Boston. www.shiftorchestraproject.com; www.clausura.org
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.