A concert in honor of St. Cecilia

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 11, 2026

An announcement for our friends in the New York area: One of Catholic Culture’s readers is helping to organize the first in a series of sacred music concerts at the parish of St. Agnes in midtown Manhattan, right by Grand Central Station. (Blessed Fulton Sheen preached his Good Friday sermons in this church.) The concert, She Sang in Her Heart, will take place on November 22, feast of St. Cecilia, patron of music (also coinciding with the solemnity of Christ the King this year). One of its purposes is to raise money for the sacred music program at St. Agnes.

Our readers can get 10% off the ticket price using the discount code “CatholicCulture10”. (Catholic Culture does not benefit financially from this arrangement.)

Here is the press release describing the concert, which includes the premiere of a new piece inspired by St. Cecilia and her husband St. Valerian. It looks to be a beautiful event:

A sixth-century account of Cecilia’s wedding day says that while the instruments played, she sang in her heart to the Lord alone. That line made the young Roman martyr the patron saint of music, and composers have answered her ever since. On her feast day, Sunday, November 22, from 3:30 to 4:30 PM, She Sang in Her Heart brings thirteen of their works, from Gregorian chant to a premiere, to the Church of Saint Agnes, sung by eight voices under Eva Sze, the parish’s Director of Music. Program and tickets: https://shesanginherheart.org/

“The concert program covers music written over nine centuries, brought to life in an hourlong concert, all in honor of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music,” says Sze. “The performers are among the finest choral singers in the city; some of them have performed with the Met, Tenet Vocal Artists, C4, and other first-rate ensembles. We have an eclectic mix of pieces from meditative to exuberant, and it is rare to hear them together on one program! Some of the pieces are among the most beautiful choral music ever written, and the singers are excited to present them.”

Women run through the program from its first notes. Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century abbess and visionary whom the Church has named a Doctor of the Church, is one of the first composers in history known by name, yet her chants are rarely heard in concert. Soprano Christa Dalmazio, who lectures and gives recitals on Hildegard, is among the singers. Near the close comes Cecilia, Busy Like a Bee by Cecilia McDowall, one of Britain’s most popular and frequently performed composers, who shares the saint’s name.

At the program’s center are two settings of one prayer. Rachmaninoff’s Bogoroditse Devo comes from his All-Night Vigil, one of the two works he loved most. Beside it comes the bright, racing Bogoroditse Djevo of Arvo Pärt, who turned 90 last year and was again in 2025 the world’s most performed living composer, by Bachtrack’s count. His meditative The Deer’s Cry is also sung, and Sir James MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn, his best-known motet, brings the program into our own time.

Cecilia has inspired artists from Chaucer and Dryden to Purcell, Handel and Britten. Five works here were written for her, among them Herbert Howells’s A Hymn for St. Cecilia and the premiere of a new work by Conner McCain, Professor and Director of Sacred Music at St. Joseph’s Seminary, the Archdiocese of New York’s major seminary: a love song of Cecilia and her husband Valerian. Its text was written in collaboration with a parishioner of St. Agnes, and is dedicated to his wife.

Sze directs the parish’s Schola Cantorum and guest musicians, eight singers in all. Members sing with the Grammy-nominated choirs of Trinity Wall Street and Seraphic Fire, Musica Sacra and the Metropolitan Opera’s Associate Chorus. Dalmazio is a three-time Encouragement Award winner in the Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition; baritone Blake Wayment is a 2026–27 VOCES8 US Scholar.

St. Agnes, a parish since 1873, stands across from the Chrysler Building. Blessed Fulton Sheen, beatified this September, preached his Good Friday sermons here to crowds that spilled into the street and made St. Agnes his home parish in his final years. The church, rebuilt in the Roman Baroque style after a 1992 fire, has St. Cecilia in the reredos behind its altar, a cherub sounding a trumpet above her. The concert inaugurates a new sacred music series at St. Agnes, and is followed by a champagne reception with a brief meditation on choral music by Zach Watters, Executive Director of New York’s School of Sacred Music.