City Choir delivers an operatic, drama-filled Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ (Cecelia Porter)

Robert Shafer, director of the City Choir of Washington, knows how to program choral concerts by coupling new music with monumental staples of the past. In the choir’s eighth season, his 140 singers can deliver both chamber and symphonic works with equal success. Shafer also enlists superb vocal soloists and a fine orchestra, forces that regularly draw a full house, as they did at a Sunday concert at the expansive National Presbyterian Church. The afternoon opened with an intriguing new work, “Triptych,” by the ­36-year-old British composer Tarik O’Regan. Turning to the late 18th century, Shafer followed the O’Regan with a ... continue reading