For 30 years, Alexis Rockman has rendered the natural world, producing both detailed oil paintings depicting the dystopian consequences of climate change, genetic engineering, and industrial pollution, and more immediate field drawings of plants and animals encountered on his travels.

“East End Field Drawings” at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill represents 85 plant and animal species, all made with sand, soil, or organic material collected from 18 sites between Bridgehampton and Montauk. The drawings are not actually created on site but in his studio, in part because birds in flight or schools of fish are unwilling subjects.

“I’ll get images anywhere I can find them,” he said. “Some are things I see, but there are many things not on the Internet or anywhere. For example, it’s very difficult to find a reference for mosquitos in flight.”

Among the places he has visited are Guyana, Antarctica, the Los Angeles tar pits, Tasmania, and the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The Los Angeles field drawings were made with tar on gessoed paper, while wombat fecal matter and acrylic polymer were the mediums used in his drawing of a Tasmanian wombat.

Mr. Rockman’s interest in the natural world has its roots in his childhood in New York City. His mother, Diane diZerega Wall, an anthropology professor and historical archeologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, worked early in her career as Margaret Mead’s secretary at the American Museum of Natural History.

“She loved animals and humans, and I was mesmerized and wanted to recreate with living things the types of things I saw at the museum.” He pointed to the wall in the Parrish’s lobby gallery where the field drawings will be on view through Jan. 18. “I was always drawing frogs. That spring peeper over there is very much like a pose in a drawing I made when I was 5 years old.”

His interest waned in the ninth grade, when “I decided girls and basketball were where it was at. After high school I realized I should go to some kind of art school, because there was no other place for me. However, art was very minimal and conceptual at the time and I felt no affinity with that.”

His interest in film and animation led him to the Rhode Island School of Design and then to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “I found my way into the art department because that’s where the smartest people were.” Meanwhile, by the time he entered S.V.A. in 1983, the art world had changed, with a younger generation having moved away from formalism toward work that was political, personal, and expressive.

“Even as a kid, I knew the history of extinction, what had already happened to animals and plants. I felt it was a fascinating moment to bring that to a fine-art context. I knew Barbara Kruger very early on, and since she and other artists were doing political work, I saw a niche for something nobody else was doing.”

While the natural world has been Mr. Rockman’s focus from the outset, he noted that he has deliberately changed his approach in terms of the language of painting. “If you look at a painting from 1986, I’d paint a turtle on the acrylic ground and it would be dripping and oozing. The field drawings involve a type of muscle I used in my paintings when they were less complicated.” Along the way he spent two years making dioramas, one of which, “Golf Course,” includes trash, Astroturf, golf balls, soil, and a cast plastic human femur, among other components.

By the early 1990s he was producing detailed, often panoramic oil paintings on wood, and has continued to do so, combining a scientist’s knowledge of the natural world with a seemingly inexhaustible visual imagination. The result is a fact-based but frightening vision of the myriad horrific ways climate change, genetic mutations, and pollution are likely to alter the landscape, urban spaces, and the plants and animals that inhabit them. “What I’m doing and need to do has a very clear agenda,” he said. “I end up painting very meticulous things.”

Mr. Rockman’s project brings to mind the dystopian fiction of the English writer J.G. Ballard, especially such early novels as “The Drowned World” from 1962, in which solar radiation has caused the polar ice caps to melt and the worldwide temperature to soar.

In 2009, the film director Ang Lee asked Mr. Rockman to help him develop the look of his film "Life of Pi." "My friend Jean Castelli had been working with Ang since the mid-1990s, and I knew he was working on 'Life of Pi.' After I met Ang and read the script, he told me things he needed help with. He had to show the studio his vision. So I developed the island and that underwater sequence, which didn't exist yet, and some other stuff. I made five elaborate watercolors.”

The artist is working on several other projects, including one with Mr. Castelli, that involve film. “Those projects would have been impossible even five years ago, so I would say the awareness of climate change has increased dramatically. But that should have happened 20 years ago. There are so many powerful forces of capitalism that have just destroyed the earth. Not that communism would have done a better job. It’s really human nature. I’m so furious and sad about all that stuff that it’s why I do what I do.”

Mr. Rockman first came to the East End in the late 1980s. Since 2003, he and Dorothy Spears, a writer who contributes regularly to The New York Times, Art in America, and other publications, have been renting in Sag Harbor when not in the city. "The East End project had been gestating in my brain somewhere for a while before I went ahead with it last year," he said.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Parrish selected Mr. Rockman as its second artist-in-residence. He spent the week of Dec. 14 leading over 400 students in hands-on workshops to create original field drawings using materials they gathered from sites of their own choosing -— usually their backyards. A visitor to the museum’s theater that week found the artist with some 75 students from the Riverhead Charter School, answering questions and responding to the drawings they were busy making.

“The reason I did this project,” he said, “was because I’ve gone all over the world and done this kind of thing — the field drawings — so why don’t I do it where I spend most of my time. It was a great opportunity to learn what’s out here. Part of my pitch to the museum was that it would be educational, which it is, and which is really what I care about.”

The field drawings are not only a stylistic alternative to paintings that are densely populated with plants and animals surviving and mutating in a dystopian future, they also take the artist out of the studio. Several weeks ago he went on a field trip with the curator of collections at the Museum of Natural History to go fossil hunting in the five boroughs.

“We found a mastodon in northern Manhattan, a walrus on Rockaway Beach, a phytosaur in the Palisades, and a squirrel in my backyard.”

There is a good deal of excitement at the Bay Street Theater in advance of its 25th season, so much so that Scott Schwartz, the artistic director, has already announced two of its upcoming summer productions just on the cusp of 2016.

The first, “The Forgotten Woman,” Jonathan Tolins’s play about an opera singer on the cusp of divadom, which begins in May, is to be directed by Noah Himmelstein. It will have its world premiere in Sag Harbor. A pared-down version of “My Fair Lady,” the second production, will open around July 4.

This is Mr. Schwartz’s third season and he is building on 2015’s unqualified success. “We had a new sort of resurgence of growth last summer, both from an attendance and financial perspective. It was one of the best summers we’ve ever had.”

Instead of feeling pressure to repeat year 24’s triumph for year 25, he said the anniversary has been an inspiration. “This theater is burning incredibly bright. We have had major directors, writers, and actors from the beginning.” Mr. Schwartz aims to continue that record, “to be a bright leader on the theater scene of the East End and nationally.”

He has had a chance to work within the community and learn its tastes, which he has taken into account in his programming. “This is an audience that wants cutting-edge works they haven’t seen in New York City last year, or in any other theater.” Using that criteria, he includes not only new works but “visionary productions of classical works, revivals they haven’t seen in the past few years.”

“My Fair Lady” is one such, “one of the greatest musicals ever written, in my top 10 favorites of anything I’ve ever done.” In choosing it for this season, the director said he wanted to take “this big, classic, beloved show and put it in our space, which is incredibly intimate . . . to strip it down to its core.” Using a two-piano version of the score, he said, would allow the audience to concentrate more on the complicated characters and their relationships.

In this way, explained Mr. Schwartz, he can play up Bay Street’s intimacy. He saw a similar production in London a few years ago at the Chocolate Factory. “I love sitting in the audience and feeling like I’m just inches away from these brilliant performances,” he said.

Based on George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” the musical has the benefit of Shaw’s “richly written characters — Eliza, Higgins, Pickering, Higgins’s mother. At Bay Street we can go deeper, look closer at these people, and see into their hearts.” It is an approach, he said, that will look quite familiar to those who saw “Grey Gardens” last summer. “It had a wonderful large Broadway production a few years ago. By our doing it with Rachel York and Betty Buckley, the audience got to experience the musical in a different way.”

He called the language in “My Fair Lady” amazing, and its relationships very human. “These are not the usual two-dimensional characters of musical theater. They are real people — strong, funny, neurotic. They are as contemporary as any character written today.” And, he said, the story of clashing social classes and the battle of the sexes is something “I’m very excited to have here.”

The character of Margaret Meier in “The Forgotten Woman” continues a theme of “portraits of strong women who are going through a complicated time in their lives, who come into their own power over the course of their two respective shows, set in different periods.”

She is a gifted soprano terrified of success and fame. A reporter who comes to her hotel room becomes the catalyst for appraising her life and the things about it that make her uncomfortable, including aspects of her marriage and family, her weight, her ambition, and the sacrifices she has made for her career.

“The central character is this incredibly funny, neurotic woman in the process of becoming a diva. You see her struggles with men, her life, her weight. The character of Margaret is delicious.”

Mr. Schwartz hopes the two plays will prompt a conversation with the audience over the course of the summer. Bay Street’s third play, yet to be announced, could continue the theme, he said, or take a different direction. “I wanted to make sure I had the perfect work for the season, and I am still finalizing a decision.”

The director intends to continue presenting work by women writers or focused on female characters. “There is still a gender gap in not-for-profit theater,” he said. “Men work more frequently.”

Equally important, “I view it as my job as artistic director to program works that are diverse and inspiring, that speak to the community in different ways. I want to offer things they can’t see anywhere else.”

Daniel Jones Photographs

The Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor will present a solo exhibition of photographs by Daniel Jones from Saturday through Jan. 30. A reception will take place Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Mr. Jones, who lives in Southold, works in the tradition of such landscape photographers as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, using an 8-by-10 view camera to capture the visual richness of his subjects, which have ranged from Alaskan brown bears in the wild to rocks and mist in Acadia to the dunes of the East End.

As a counterpoint to his stately black-and-white images he also creates colorful abstract impressions of architecture and seascapes. The exhibition will include selections from his “Seaside Impression” series and large-format landscapes.

“Winter Light” in Southampton

“Winter Light: East End Artists,” a group show organized by Arlene Bujese, will be on view at the Southampton Cultural Center from Tuesday through Feb. 15. A reception will be held on Jan. 16 from 5 to 7 p.m.

According to Ms. Bujese, the show aims to brighten the dark winter months with colorful and stimulating paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs that range from abstract to figurative.

The exhibition will include work by Shari Abramson, Calvin Albert, Marcel Bally, Monica Banks, Deborah Black, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Darlene Charneco, Josh Dayton, Mary Daunt, G. Duggan, Carol Hunt, Tracy Jamar, Margaret Kerr, Dennis Leri, Christa Maiwald, Fulvio Massi, Louise Peabody, Paton Miller, Pope Noell, Alexander Rus­so, Roseann Schwab, Walter Schwab, and Dan Welden.

“Purity”

By Jonathan Franzen 

Despite a murder in the novel’s first third that feels like a forced attempt at Dostoyevskian themes, Mr. Franzen proves once again that he is our most vital novelist; there is simply no other writer who wraps his or her arms around such large swaths of contemporary life. Though “Purity” is more globe-trotting than Mr. Franzen’s earlier work, weaving its way through Oakland, Berlin, Bolivia, and the American Southwest, it loses little of the author’s usual emotional intimacy. While tackling themes such as the environment, social media, family bonds, and purity itself, at its heart “Purity” is a novel about a girl looking for her father. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28)

“A Manual for Cleaning Women”

By Lucia Berlin

It is astonishing to think that if you lived in Northern California in the late 1970s, there was a chance that the woman cleaning your house might also be one of America’s best short-story writers. The life of Lucia Berlin (who died in 2004) was riddled with alcoholism, broken marriages, and odd jobs — and so it is with many of her characters. With its working-class milieu and economical writing style, her work stands as a companion to that of Raymond Carver. 

The book is too long by a third — both the brilliant and the mediocre are collected here — but few of the stories will fail to move you, and a handful carry a real wallop. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26)

“Dead Wake”

By Erik Larson

Another propulsive nonfiction book by Mr. Larson, whose historical narratives are more engrossing than most novels. The book chronicles the sinking of the Lusitania from multiple perspectives, including various passengers and crew members and, most compellingly, the German U-boat commander who is stalking them. Mr. Larson’s research is exhilarating — he has an eye for the small details that make characters whole and scenes come alive. But finally it’s his storytelling instincts that keep you coming back for more; he’s the rare historian whose books are so riveting you can’t believe it’s all true. (Crown, $28)

“The Visiting Privilege”

By Joy Williams

A great short-story writer who has always flown just under the radar. The author’s relationship to her characters is often despairing, sometimes even downright misanthropic. Yet Ms. Williams wields a mordant wit that captures the joyful absurdity of human beings, and which is itself a kind of exaltation. As with all great fiction, you will see people you know in its pages, sometimes even yourself. And yet for all the familiarity, the author is full of surprises: Anyone who thinks he knows where a Joy Williams story is going is in for a shock. 

Fifty-six of her stories for 30 bucks? That’s a true embarrassment of riches. (Knopf)

“H Is for Hawk”

By Helen Macdonald

A meditation on death and bereavement that miraculously uses nature-writing as its engine. When Ms. Macdonald’s father dies suddenly on a London street she resolves to tame a young goshawk — the most fearsome and unpredictable of predator birds. Why a goshawk? In the author’s despair she finds the hawk’s temperament mirrors her own, “solitary, self-possessed, free from grief and the hurts of human life.” Slowly her relationship with the hawk draws the author out of herself and her pain. That this all comes off much less corny than it sounds is a testimony to the writer’s considerable talents. Easily the most beloved memoir of the year. (Grove, $26)

“The Harder They Come”

By T.C. Boyle

The narrative bounces back and forth from the 19th century to the present, but still Mr. Boyle’s novel is the most au courant work of the year, covering America’s most pressing preoccupations: gun violence and anti-government sentiment. The genius of Mr. Boyle is that he doesn’t preach — you’re never really sure what side he’s on. In the end, though, there’s no denying the sense of horror and waste. The conclusion seems to be that America’s frontier legacy is both our blessing and our curse, but his writing is so propulsive and entertaining you almost forget to despair. (Ecco, $27.99)

“Between the World and Me”

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

A book that begins “Son,” as a black father addresses his 15-year-old boy on the pride and perils of being a black youth in America. Mr. Coates pulls no punches in his assessment of white America’s progress being “built on looting and violence.” This is a book you may want to argue with as you read it (most of them you will lose), but there’s no arguing with Mr. Coates’s powerful voice, which echoes the work of James Baldwin. The language is visceral but never hectoring, and this memoir secures Mr. Coates’s position as the pre-eminent black voice of his generation. (Spiegel & Grau, $24)

“The Dark Forest”

By Cixin Liu

Mr. Liu’s success is of the most unlikely kind — a science-fiction writer from China who became an international sensation. He is also the lead practitioner of a new genre called “hard” science fiction, where all the speculative scenarios are based on real concepts of quantum physics. The novel’s set-up sounds like a 1950s paperback: Earth prepares for an attack from a civilization that will arrive in four centuries’ time. But Mr. Liu, a software engineer by trade, has a keen sense of political machinations and a talent for schematic but believable character sketches. 

One caveat: “The Dark Forest” is the second in a trilogy, so those interested may want to begin with volume one, last year’s equally good “The Three-Body Problem.” (Tor Books, $25.99)

“Four Novels of the 1950s”

By Ross Macdonald

Another great excavation job by the Library of America, rescuing Macdonald’s reputation as a writer of mere “pulp.” Although the author is, in some ways, the inheritor of the Hammett/Chandler mantle in detective fiction, he also upended the genre. In Macdonald’s mysteries, which are set in affluent postwar Southern California, few punches are thrown, and even fewer shots are fired. The real villain is money and the way it poisons families. His spot-on depictions of 1950s suburbia, and the hole in the heart of the American dream, were a precursor to the work of John Cheever. The gin, the swimming pools, and the seersucker suits are all just a mask for spiritual decay. ($37.50)

“The Story of the Lost Child”

By Elena Ferrante

The fourth and final installment of Ms. Ferrante’s Neapolitan cycle. The books follow two women — the brilliant, inward-looking Elena and her larger-than-life friend Lila — as they try to escape their violent, provincial upbringing in Naples. In this volume, Elena returns to Naples to be with the man she has always loved and tries to renew her friendship with Lila. 

Like the previous three installments, “The Story of the Lost Child” offers little in the way of plot. Instead, Ms. Ferrante offers lifelike portraits of two of the most flawed and fascinating women in contemporary literature, along with a comprehensive look at a country painfully trying to drag itself from cloying tradition into modernity. (Europa Editions, $18)

Kurt Wenzel is the author of the novels “Lit Life,” “Gotham Tragic,” and “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.

“Life is brief and time is a thief,” Michael Weiskopf sings on “Love & Entropy,” his just-released album. “There’s no time left for the blues.” 

The lyric illustrates the theme of the singer-songwriter’s third solo release. Following 2012’s “Insomnia” and 2014’s “Suffering Fools,” “Love & Entropy” is a 10-song collection that delves into relationships in their varying stages. “There’s positive stuff — romantic love, what people want and expect from each other,” Mr. Weiskopf, who lives in East Hampton, said last week. “And then the entropy part: loss of energy, segregation, and decay.” 

Mr. Weiskopf, who also fronts the Complete Unknowns, a band that performs the music of Bob Dylan, will celebrate “Love & Entropy’s” release with an 8 p.m. gig on Jan. 8 at the Luna Star Cafe in Miami. 

The album is now for sale at the Apple iTunes Store, michaelweiskopf.com, and cdbaby.com, and will imminently be available at amazon.com and other online retailers. “Love & Entropy” has already been featured on Stony Brook University’s radio station, WUSB, where one of the D.J.s, Joe Vecchio, played five tracks and interviewed Mr. Weiskopf on Dec. 5, and on WPPB Peconic Public Broadcasting. 

Where “Suffering Fools” was overtly political, with topical songs including “Guns Don’t Kill” and “Thank You, Canada (the Ted Cruz song),” Mr. Weiskopf turns inward on “Love & Entropy,” exploring the inevitable conflicting emotions of both relationships and their aftermath. 

“The small stuff is really the big stuff,” he said of the album’s subject matter. “What we do to each other is much more within our control. We’re not going to have gun control just because I wrote a song called ‘Guns Don’t Kill.’ I like my Ted Cruz song, and it seems to be getting more viral action, but nobody who’s committed to voting for him is going to have their mind changed by it. And how can you out-parody Trump?” 

Instead, he said, “Maybe it’s about time I focus on the bigger issues. I wanted to explore different relationships, my own and what I’ve observed. The hard thing is trying to resonate and be unique. I think we did that.” 

Not surprisingly, Mr. Weiskopf’s music recalls Mr. Dylan’s organic sound, but “Love & Entropy” also brings to mind theaid-back yet subtly wry country-blues of the late J.J. Cale. In “Heavy Heart Blues,” for example, the hurt of a relationship gone bad is juxtaposed with musings about what the dog might say about it, were he able to give voice to his observations, while the guitarist Randolph Hudson III and the drummer Jim Lawler’s propulsive groove veers into, and back out of, a rhythmic and time signature change. “Better listen to him growl,” the narrator concludes, “than to hear his disturbing thoughts.” 

With “Here’s to Love,” Mr. Weiskopf concludes on a positive note, possibly delivered with a measure of irony. “This is the human condition, we do this,” he said. “People fall in and out of love all the time, and we all seem to go back and hit it for another round.” 

Like his previous albums, “Love & Entropy” was recorded and mixed by the producer Cynthia Daniels at her MonkMusic Studios in East Hampton. Ms. Daniels and Mr. Hudson, who worked on both of Mr. Weiskopf’s previous albums, share production duties. 

“Randy and I have a really good way of communicating,” Mr. Weiskopf said. “So do he and Cynthia, so do Cynthia and I. I think we’re a good combination, and we all had equal weight.” As a producer, Ms. Daniels “knows how to make you feel comfortable and take risks in that environment,” he said. “That’s a really important part of making a record.” 

“It’s been a privilege to be involved with all three,” said Mr. Hudson, who also performs with the Complete Unknowns, “and to see Michael’s progression as a songwriter and a performer. I’ve also seen how much more comfortable he’s become in the production process, how the relationship and camaraderie between him and Cynthia has evolved.” 

Mr. Weiskopf also called on South Fork musicians including Peter Martin Weiss, Klyph Black, James Benard, Alex Sarkis, Dan Koontz, Joe Delia, and Mariann Megna. “The local musicians here are an incredible pool of talent,” he said. “That’s another reason to make East Hampton a recording destination.” The Complete Unknowns make an appearance too, on a cover of Mr. Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street.” 

The initial response has been positive, Mr. Weiskopf said, with songs from “Love & Entropy” performed at venues on the North and South Forks as well as in Brooklyn. In September, when recording was completed, he traveled to Oslo, where he was invited to sit in at four venues in three nights, “with some great players and crowds that were actively listening, even in bars,” he said. “I was struck by how welcoming and eager to hear original music they were.” 

In addition to the Jan. 8 release party, Mr. Weiskopf will perform with the Complete Unknowns at the B.B. King Blues Club and Grill in Manhattan on Jan. 16 at 1:30 p.m. The Complete Unknowns will also perform at Guild Hall in East Hampton in July 2016.

Ten years ago the Metropolitan Opera launched its Live in HD series with Julie Taymor’s production of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute.” Guild Hall will present an encore screening of the opera on Saturday at 1 p.m.

In addition to the humor and puppetry of Ms. Taymor, whose many directing credits include the stage musical “The Lion King” and, less happily, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” the production was conducted by James Levine with a cast including Nathan Gunn, Ying Huang, Matthew Polenzani, Erika Miklosa, and René Pape. 

This shortened, English-language production runs slightly less than two hours. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

For those who prefer Sammy Cahn or Cole Porter to Mozart, the East Hampton Library is offering “Celebrating Sinatra at 100” on Saturday at 2 p.m. The program will feature Jerry Costanzo, a singer, bandleader, and master interpreter of the Great American Songbook, who promises to “carry you back to an era when this sultry and swinging music was the ‘Pop’ of the day.” 

The program is free, but registration is required by phone or at the library’s adult reference desk.

Bay Street Theater will throw a holiday party and sing-along with the special guests Don Duga, the animator who helped create “Frosty the Snowman,” and Rick Unterberg, a piano bar entertainer, on Monday at 7 p.m. The evening will begin with a short conversation with Mr. Duga, who will then demonstrate his craft and create caricatures that place interested partyers into scenes from “Frosty.”

Mr. Unterberg, who will lead the sing-along, is a regular performer at the Townhouse piano bar in New York City who received the Bistro Award from Backstage magazine for outstanding achievement as a piano bar entertainer. Tickets are $15, $30 including a caricature.

Also at Bay Street, Studio 3 of Bridgehampton will present “Mixed Nuts,” its musical theater mash-up of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “The Nutcracker,” tomorrow and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. 

Advance tickets are $20, $15 for senior citizens and children under 10; the cost will be $25 and $20 at the door. More information and tickets can be had by calling 537-3008.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will hold its fifth Gesture Jam, a theatrical figure drawing event, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Andrea Cote, an artist and educator who conceived the idea for the class while living in Seattle in the 1990s, will lead the program. John Bonafede and Molly Morgan Weiss, multidisciplinary artists based in New York City, will be the featured models.

The two-hour event is structured into three 30-minute drawing sessions separated by short breaks. Participants, under the guidance of Ms. Cote, will sketch the models in various poses ranging from five-minute gestures to more sustained compositions.

Participants have been encouraged to bring their own sketchpads and dry media drawing materials. The cost is $10, free for members and students, and food and drink will be available for purchase at the museum’s cafe.

For those who love music, the Christmas season can present a conflicted situation. Often, a favorite carol or album is essential to enjoying the season and to connecting current celebrations to those of years past. Many music lovers seek out and delight in annual performances by dependable ensembles of particular works, such as “The Nutcracker” or Handel’s “Messiah,” or pull out a collection of CDs that only sees the light of day during the portion of the year with the least daylight. But alongside this intentional and often pleasurable music of the season, it is a reality of modern life that nearly any sort of commercial activity can result in unsolicited music broadcast over a public address system, often featuring tired retreads. 

Any combination of the above might lead a music lover to think of Christmas music as a closed set of works, just a yearly revival of traditions or an unwelcome annual rehashing of bland holiday songs during each shopping trip in November and December.

On Dec. 6, fortunately, the Choral Society of the Hamptons offered a different approach in its concert “A Rose In Winter.” Mark Mangini, the society’s music director, conducted an adventurous program featuring Christmas music from the 15th through the 20th centuries, embracing many styles and traditions and offering music lovers the opportunity to expand on their ideas of favorite holiday music.

The first four pieces, “Four Carols for the Annunciation,” consisted of three anonymous 15th-century English carols followed by one Basque carol arranged by Edgar Pettman (1866-1943). A semi-chorus of singers stood in front of the main chorus, allowing the carols to alternate among many textural variations. The main function of the full chorus was to sing the opening salutation and several refrains based on it, using a vigorous unison sound. The “harmonized” portions of the carols featured various groupings from within the semi-chorus, including three-part women’s voices; a duet between the altos and tenors, with basses joining on the repeat; a duet between tenors and basses, and a soprano-alto duet. The final carol, Pettman’s arrangement of “Gabriel’s Message,” gave the audience its first opportunity to hear the full choral society singing in four parts, revealing a firm choral tone and an excellent blend of voices.

“Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen” by Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) is better known to English-speakers as “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming.” It may have been the most familiar tune to most listeners, and inspired the name of the program. The full chorus, accompanied delicately on a portative organ by Thomas Bohlert, presented two verses of the carol using its original language, briefly but beautifully separated by a presentation of Melchior Vulpius’s four-part canon based on the same melody. The chorus then presented another Praetorius work, “Psallite,” allowing the audience to hear how the composer of such a familiar carol handles contrapuntal music at a faster tempo.

The next two pieces, “Jesu, rex admiribilis” by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594) and “Christe, redemptor omnium” by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), were performed by the sopranos and altos of the full chorus. The music has very little accompaniment and calls for a number of highly vulnerable entrances from the singers. While most of these came across well, there was one entrance each from the altos and the sopranos where pitch was not immediately secure. Even so, the choral society should be commendedfor taking on these tricky pieces and delivering a nearly flawless performance of them.

“Hodie Christus natus est” by Giavonni Gabrieli (1570-1615) was an exciting finish to the first half of the program. A portion of the chorus and a consort of double-reed woodwinds moved to the rear of the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, with the main part of the chorus and Mr. Bohlert on the portative organ remaining at the front. The interplay between the two choruses, separated by space as they would have been in Gabrieli’s home cathedral of St. Mark, electrified the audience. 

A special challenge in music from the early Baroque arises from the frequent changes of meter, and these changes can prove difficult to bring about with musicians spread farther apart than usual. Kudos to Mr. Mangini for his clarity as a conductor, and to the singers and players for achieving the cori spezzat effect.

The second half of the program featured “Lauda per la natività del signore” by Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936). The orchestration of this piece explained the composition of the South Fork Chamber Ensemble for this concert, as Respighi called for double-reed woodwinds and flutes, with a touch of piano (four hands). Mr. Bohlert shared the piano with Christine Cadarette, the chorus’s accompanist, for the final movement, having moved from the portative organ, where he had provided some gentle guidance for the singers in passages meant to be sung a cappella. It is worth noting that Mr. Bohlert played flawlessly on three separate instruments over the course of the concert, while Ms. Cadarette immediately picked up her folder and sang with the chorus at any moment where the piano was still.

Respighi’s piece calls for an expressive mezzo-soprano to play Mary, and Cherry Duke certainly filled that need. Nils Neubert, tenor, sang beautifully as the Shepherd. However, it was Mizuho Takeshita who shone the brightest in her role as the Angel. Her voice soared and plunged magnificently, as required for the role, always with excellent diction and timing. 

The choral society deserves credit for presenting a program that offered listeners a chance to explore Christmas music from outside the usual channels of  tradition.