Could they all just get along? Mostly, they did

Nobody can accuse the Month of Moderns festival of foisting a single school of modern composition on its listeners.

The first of the three concerts by the Crossing choir Sunday at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill touched all sorts of aesthetic bases: Radical minimalism rubbed shoulders with an openhearted manner influenced by Samuel Barber. Thanks to Crossing conductor Donald Nally, the program's sequencing was masterly and performances made you love everything. Well, almost.

Statement to the Court, a world premiere by David Lang, was the big news. This Pulitzer Prize-winning member of the downtown New York experimental Bang on a Can composer collective is becoming a consistent Philadelphia presence thanks to the Crossing, the Mendelssohn Club and, this fall, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Why not? Philadelphia seems ready for it. Though his language is minimalist based, one never knows what conventional notions of composition he'll embrace or discard.

Statement to the Court sets to music the 1918 speech of Eugene Debs as he was about to be sentenced for his supposedly seditious anti-World War I protests. The beauty of Debs' idealism is timeless and, in hindsight, charts the distinctively American pendulum swing between humanitarian and mercantile ethics.

The text was sung in sensibly segmented phrases with repeated notes and rhythmic energy that felt poetically explosive. Spiritual references came in outbursts of thick harmony that seemed all the more intense for being surrounded by severity. Particularly poetic moments had solo voices breaking out of the chorus. The ending was arresting. After the line "I am now prepared to receive your sentence," the music halted with an abrupt defiance of everything we know about how a piece should conclude. It's major Lang; how major will be determined in subsequent encounters.

Even more hearings will be needed to appreciate the contrapuntal complexities of Cantata: To One in Paradise by Benjamin CS Boyle, who inventively mined the Edgar Allan Poe poem "Thou wast all to me, love" for a far-reaching, multi-movement piece. Though the music is as dense as Bach's cantatas, the solo vocal writing is expansive and lyrical - Crossing tenor Daniel O'Dea was wonderful - with subterranean agitation appropriate to Poe.