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Six Days to
Sumptuous Planet: the album!
Nature is a magnificent structure!

Last summer, we got so excited about David Shapiro’s magnum opus – Sumptuous Planet: A Secular Mass – we made some videos. They’re here now to lay the path (and appease our impatience!) for the release of the full 70-minute album
this Friday, November 10.

Here is the third movement: Glory – Magnificent Structure.

And it sure is a magnificent structure: 
virtuosic, immediate, and spectacular – 
an expression of belief about the nature of life 
and the joy we can find in understanding it. 


Out November 10 on New Focus Recordings
Sumptuous Planet: A Secular Mass
music by David Shapiro

commissioned by The Crossing

3. Glory — Magnificent Structure
”Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.”

Gloria repleta est natura
Magnifica campages est natura. Possumus
intelligere autem, licet imperfecte. Et haec quidem
oportet replere sensu humilitatis hominem
cogitantem sua mente.

– Richard Dawkins, from The God Delusion (Mariner Books, 2008),
used by kind permission of the author. Latin translation by Theodore Cheek.

recording by Paul Vazquez
video by Four/Ten Media

This album is made with the generous support of the Neubauer Family Foundation
and an Anonymous donor

Recorded July 7, 2022 at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
Up Next
David Lang's poor hymnal
The Crossing @ Christmas 2023
The Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Concerts

imagine a religion
with the less fortunate at its center;
this is their hymnal

Friday, December 15 @ 6pm & 8:30pm
presented by Penn Live Arts
Iron Gate Theater, University of Pennsylvania
Sunday, December 17 @ 5pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
header photo by Ben Simon Rehn