Choral Evensong on the Feast of Pentecost

Jeffrey Hoffman
6 days ago
2 min read

On Sunday, May 24, 2026 at 4:oo pm, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church will present a service of Choral Evensong for the Feast of Pentecost, featuring the St. Luke’s Evensong Choir and with voluntaries before and after the service offered by the St. Luke’s Handbell Ringers. This will be the last Choral Evensong of the 2025-2026 Choral Season. A wine and cheese reception in the parish commons will follow the service.

The music sung at this service will include settings of the canticles Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis by Lee Hoiby, a setting of the ancient candlelighting hymn Phos hilaron by Tennessee native Craig Phillips, and the anthem Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace by Bruce Neswick. A new setting of preces and responses by St. Luke’s Director of Music, Jeffrey Hoffman, will also be premiered at this service.

The American composer Lee Hoiby (1926-2011) was primarily known for his operas, of which his 1971 setting of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, a collaboration with librettist Lanford Wilson, is his best known. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Hoiby was educated at Mills College, where he studied classical composition with Darius Milhaud, and the Curtis Institute of Music, where he was a composition student of Giancarlo Menotti. Like his mentor Menotti, he bucked the mid-century compositional trends toward cerebral, esoteric atonality by establishing himself as a composer of melodies meant for singing.

This set of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis is Hoiby’s sole published setting of the evening canticles, commissioned in the early 1980s by Peter Fyfe and Christ Church in Nashville and dedicated “for Larry King,” who was then the legendary organist and choirmaster of Trinity Church, Wall Street, New York City. These canticles show Hoiby as an imaginative and dramatic melodist with a flair for long vocal lines and rhythmic instrumental writing.

Bruce Neswick (b. 1956) is a native of Kennewick, Washington and an alumnus of Pacific Lutheran University and Yale School of Music and the Institute of Sacred Music. He has served as canon musician and director of cathedral music for five Episcopal cathedrals around the United States, including Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon; the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the Cathedral of St. Phillip in Atlanta, the Cathedral of St. Paul in Buffalo, and Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington, Kentucky. Having now retired from Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Neswick remains an active organ recitalist, choral clinician, and composer; currently serving as Interim Organist/Choirmaster at St. James-in-the-City Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. His anthem Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace was commissioned thirty years ago by the choir of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in memory of the Reverend James Jones Diffee, Jr., a priest of the parish.