Preview: Chicago Chorale: Music for All Saints’ Concert/Hyde Park Union Church

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The Catholic Church countered the Druidic November 1 New Year celebration of Samhain and its death motif and symbolism with All Hallows’ or All Saints’ Day, to be followed immediately after on November 2 by All Souls’ Day, which with All Hallows’ Eve on October 31, made for a full?scale three-day celebration of the dead. Even the name “Hallowe’en” is actually a conflation of “Hallow Even,” which is itself short for “Hallow’s Evening.” A hallowed one, by the way, is a holy one, as the Lord’s Prayer still tells us: “Hallowed by thy name.” Despite this serious attempt to make a sacred Christian holiday out of a secular pagan celebration, the sinister aspects of Halloween never quite left the holiday. Even in Protestantism, where October 31 is celebrated as “Reformation Day” because this was the day that Martin Luther posted his famous nintey-five theses on the Cathedral door at Wittenburg, witches and goblins still abound. The Chicago Chorale will take note of the holiday with a special “Music for All Saints’ Concert” conducted by Bruce Tammen that will include one of Bach’s best known and most loved motets, “Komm, Jesu, komm,” (“Come, Jesus, Come”) written for double choir for the funeral of the wife of a Leipzig dignitary and which contrasts the decline of old age with the promise of eternal rest in Jesus. Vaughan Williams’ Mass in g minor offers a twentieth-century perspective on the use of double choir, while looking back to the sixteenth-century by evoking Renaissance polyphony. Schoenberg’s “Friede aud Erden” (“Peace on Earth”) was his final tonal work before turning exclusively to twelve-tone music and evokes in an a cappella fashion the power of his “Gurre-Lieder” and hopes for peace in this world as well as the next. (Dennis Polkow)

November 1 at Hyde Park Union Church, 5600 S. Woodlawn, 3pm. $12-$20. Also November 2, St. John’s Lutheran Church, 215 S. Lincoln, Lombard, (773)306-6195. 7:30pm.