Upcoming Concerts

​Bird Song: Love for a Sacred Place —​ Sunday, February 22, 2026, at 3 pm
​Bastyr University Chapel, 14500 Juanita Dr NE, Kenmore​
As the sun’s first rays filter through the window, the chorus of birds begins to sing. This routine moment, fleeting though it may be, binds us to the earth. The outside becomes inside, and for a moment we bear witness to one of nature’s simplest wonders: a bird’s love song for the world. Across cultures and centuries, birds have been our messengers and muses. They don’t just sing about the world, they sing from it.
Kirkland Choral Society’s annual "love" concert has continued to evolve, and this season is no exception. Our program this year invites you to become a lover of our beautiful world. ​At the heart of the concert is Alex Berko’s Sacred Place, which weaves together texts from American environmentalists and poets who reflect on their relationship—fueled by love—with the earth. We also encounter awe-struck wonder in the music of Stanford, Shaw, Mendelssohn, Cordero, and Hagenberg, and the prophetic urgency of Joel Thompson’s setting of Maya Angelou’s words, as birds seek to claim their sky. Their voices awaken our eyes to the joy of flight, and our hearts to the urgency of preserving and stewarding what we so easily take for granted. May our love at sunrise become action by sunset—for the earth, and for one another.
Grant Us Peace: The Sky Is Silent. We Are Not. —​ Sunday, April 26, 2026, at 3 pm
with Philharmonia Northwest
​Bastyr University Chapel, 14500 Juanita Dr NE, Kenmore​
​In November 1963, Leonard Bernstein responded to the Kennedy assassination by saying, “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” In a world fractured by war and division, this KCS program brings together two musical mosaics—responses to war that blend both sacred and secular texts into acts of remembrance, resistance, and hope. Our partner orchestra Philharmonia Northwest joins us for this powerful and evocative performance.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem, written between two world wars, combines the Latin Mass with wartime poetry of American writer Walt Whitman as an urgent plea for peace. Composed nearly 70 years later, Tarik O’Regan’s Triptych is a more modern response to wartime violence, specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that O’Regan witnessed in 2005. (Twenty years later, this conflict persists.) Triptych weaves texts from Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and secular traditions into a tapestry of shared human longing. Though born of different times, both works draw on multiple texts and traditions to confront violence head on and acknowledge the dignity of every human life. Imagine the sound of peace: silence in heaven, and harmony on earth. Dona nobis pacem—grant us peace.
Kirkland Choral Society gratefully acknowledges the financial and other support of these generous organizations: