Resonance Works | Pittsburgh has demonstrated an innovative streak in its musical programming, earning its own niche in the city’s concert landscape.

The multimodal arts company is now in its fifth season, with an operating budget of about $100,000. Resonance Works mounts four or five productions a season that feature instrumentalists, vocal soloists and a choir in music ranging from Renaissance “hits” to contemporary, Pulitzer Prize-winning works.

Take this past weekend as an example. Maria Sensi Sellner, Resonance Works’ artistic and general director with a background in both music and engineering, placed Bach and Bernstein alongside Arvo Part and the New York-based composer David Lang, whose “little match girl passion” — a setting of the Hans Christian Andersen tale by the same name — earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Ms. Sellner conducted the concerts in the Homewood Cemetery Chapel, with walking tours of the cemetery and a short musical prelude preceding the performances.

Ms. Sellner built the program around the Pittsburgh premiere of Mr. Lang’s piece, pairing sunny, life-affirming works like Bach’s Concerto in C Major, BWV 1055, featuring Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra principal flute Lorna McGhee as soloist with Bernstein’s “Halil” (again featuring Ms. McGhee), composed to honor the memory of a young Israeli flutist killed in the Yom Kippur war.

At Sunday’s performance, “little match girl passion” was the unquestionable highlight of the evening.

The piece tells a dismal but transformative tale of a young girl freezing to death on the streets, striking matches and witnessing visions of warmth and love. There are two versions of Mr. Lang’s music, one for a vocal quartet and one for a choir. Ms. Sellner mixed the two versions, setting up a call-and-response feel between soloists and choir that suited the music (Mr. Lang drew inspiration for the piece from the format of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”). 

Choir and soloists attended to the shivering, almost primal chant-like text-settings with reverence, conjuring a sense of bleakness and slowly transforming their sound into one of tenderness and warmth. 

Other standouts Sunday evening included Ms. McGhee’s gripping take on “Halil” and James MacMillan’s “Lux Aterna” for chorus. The remainder of the program was enjoyably and capably performed, but it included various intonation, tempi and balance issues in both the orchestra and chorus (rushing in the final movement of the Bach concerto, some pitch problems in the Golijov).

Nothing egregious, but the first half of the program didn’t hold up against the strength of the “little match girl passion.”

Resonance Works | Pittsburgh’s next performance, Dvorak’s opera “Rusalka,” is scheduled for May 11 and 13. Information: resonanceworks.org.

Jeremy Reynolds: jreynolds@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1634; twitter: @Reynolds_PG. Mr. Reynolds' work at the Post-Gazette is supported in part by a grant from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Getty Foundation, and the Rubin Institute.

First Published: March 20, 2018, 9:07 p.m.