Four Days to
Sumptuous Planet: the album!
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones…
 
Here’s another of those videos we made last Summer, knowing we were going to be impatiently anticipating this Friday’s release of our 31st album, David Shapiro’s Sumptuous Planet: A Secular Mass!
 
This one’s a little more serious than Friday’s;
the twelfth movement, Death — The Lucky Ones.
Like each of the sixteen movements of Sumptuous Planet,
it is its own marvelous world.
This one, spacious –
each sweeping, soaring vocal line making room for the other;
it feels timeless, and grateful.


Out November 10 on New Focus Recordings.

Get ready – it's almost here!
Sumptuous Planet: A Secular Mass
music by David Shapiro

commissioned by The Crossing

12. Death — The Lucky Ones
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. … It is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

– Richard Dawkins, from Unweaving Rainbows: science, delusion, and the appetite for wonder (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), used by kind permission of the author.

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