The holiday season in New York is full of Christmas traditions, from the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, to the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, to Company XIV’s spicier Nutcracker Rouge. But Christmas hasn’t always been just about celebrating the flashy and festive. It’s also a holiday with a long tradition of ghosts and monsters, a time to face our fears and maybe have a good cry. And if there’s any show in December that will guarantee you a good cry, it’s Ekmeles’s performance of David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion.
Presented by Death of Classical as part of the Crypt Sessions, The Little Match Girl Passion is, to date, the only concert in the series that has ever been repeated. After its first inclusion in the Crypt Sessions in December 2023, founder Andrew Ousley found the experience to be so magical that it had to become a Christmas tradition.
Composed by David Lang, the Little Match Girl Passion is a 21st-century choral work that adapts Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 literary fairy tale. In the story, a little girl spends her New Year’s Eve on the streets in the freezing cold and snow, trying to sell matches to bring money home for her abusive father. Unsuccessful and underdressed, she curls up against a wall and eventually freezes to death. Taking the narrative prose of the original, Lang’s choral work showcases this dark story with added flourishes from a voice seemingly speaking from beyond the grave, bemoaning the little girl’s fate and their own inability to prevent it.
But it isn’t all tragedy for tragedy’s sake. Lang’s composition highlights the nuance of this beautiful story, one that seems to say that death is a release as much as it is devastating. The little girl is found dead in the street the next morning, but what those who see her can never know is that her final moments were full of hallucinations of warm stoves, lavish Christmas feasts, an enormous Christmas tree, and finally, the girl’s late grandmother (“the only one who had ever loved her,” the narrative morosely states). The girl, for whom freezing in the streets is better than returning home empty-handed to her father, is carried away in death in the arms of her grandmother.
Ekmeles’s performance of The Little Match Girl Passion is nothing short of magical. In the small space of the crypt at the Church of the Intercession in Washington Heights, the music fills the air and the story envelopes the audience. Soprano Charlotte Mundy and mezzo-soprano Elisa Sutherland lead the narrative with clear and resounding tones filled with melancholy, accompanied by Tomás Cruz’s sweet tenor and Steven Hrycelak’s comforting bass notes. They oscillate between the staccato storytelling of Andersen’s tale and the mournful choral interludes, back and forth like a vocal wave ebbing and flowing, until we are all at least a little misty-eyed, if not full-on crying as they chant, “Where is your grave, daughter?…Rest soft, daughter”.
The Little Match Girl Passion may not be a Christmas tradition meant to make its audience feel merry and bright. But it’s a rare, impossibly cool experience that makes us think about the human condition during a time of year that often lets corporations take center stage. It asks us to step away from the noise, to take the good with the bad, acknowledge both the light and the dark, and to indulge in our empathy. One can only hope that this new Christmas tradition by Death of Classical will return for holiday seasons to come to delight our ears and keep us grounded.
Performed by Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble (Charlotte Mundy, soprano; Elisa Sutherland, mezzo-soprano; Tomás Cruz, tenor; Steven Hrycelak, bass; Jeffrey Gavett, conductor)
Composed by David Lang, after the story by Hans Christian Andersen
Presented by Death of Classical as part of The Crypt Sessions
The Crypt at Church of the Intercession (Washington Heights)