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.

Gabriele Raacke, who grew up in a small village in the Black Forest near Freiburg, Germany, wanted to be a bookseller. To that end she attended the booksellers school in Frankfurt, which offered a three-and-a-half-year program required for anybody who wanted to work in a bookstore or publishing house. 

“You learn about literature, everything to do with books, including the business side of having a bookstore,” she said recently in her East Hampton studio. “And after three and a half years you get tested, and if you don’t pass you have to go back to school.” Her sister had a bookstore, but it turned out Ms. Raacke never did. Africa intervened.

To those who know her as an artist who has been exhibiting her paintings on the East End for the past 20 years, it may come as a surprise not only that she is self-taught but also that she had several lives before ever picking up a brush.

When she was 19, she met her future husband, Gordian Raacke, who is now the executive director of Renewable Energy Long Island, an East Hampton nonprofit. Two years later, on a whim, they traveled together to Africa.

“The first year, we traveled for a few months and fell in love with Africa. We crossed the desert in a Citroen 2CV and we got the bug.” They made three trips there, returning to Germany when they ran out of money, then going back to Africa when they could afford to. They worked on a development project in the Central African Republic.

“With all the warfare in that region, I don’t think I’ll ever go back,” she said. “It was difficult. There were no roads, so we had to build our own. For some children we were the first white people they had ever seen.”

After a few years in Germany, they came to New York City, “with a guitar and a backpack. We were hippies. We didn’t know we wanted to live here. We had this fantasy that we would cross America.” However, Mr. Raacke’s mother purchased an unfinished loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa and asked if her son and daughter-and-law would fix up the space. “So we built a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. That was how we were able to stay there.”

It becomes clear very quickly in conversation that the Raackes have a longstanding tendency to do things themselves, whether it’s building roads in Africa, renovating a loft, or, eventually, building their energy-efficient, solar-powered house and studio on five wooded acres in East Hampton. 

While living on Chambers Street in the late 1980s, a friend from Brazil came to stay with the Raackes. “He was a painter, and he had this big canvas. Every night he painted, and every night I watched him work because I thought it was amazing. At one point I think he got tired of me watching him, so he handed me a brush and said, ‘Why don’t you start to paint yourself?’ ” 

While she worked on canvas at first, she is best known for her reverse paintings on glass. The transition began in the early 1990s with a series of glass dinner plates. She painted silhouettes of animals in reverse on the backs of the plates, then added a layer of gold, copper, or silver leaf beneath the image. Bergdorf Goodman purchased 12 of the plates to begin with, sold them, and eventually ordered more than 100.

Then a friend decided to remodel her house and gave Ms. Raacke 14 windows, suggesting she paint on them. Again, working in reverse, she started by painting the outlines of the image, then built up the paint beneath the image to get the background. The technique can be traced back to the Middle Ages.

“I don’t know how to paint on canvas anymore,” she said, “because it’s just the opposite.” The fact that the paint is beneath the glass adds a luminance that can’t be achieved on canvas. Because the back is essentially an abstract painting in itself, some collectors hang them so that both sides are visible.

Ms. Raacke’s images have been influenced by her childhood memories of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, with animals, acrobats, and circus performers figuring prominently in her work. While there is a fanciful quality to her paintings that suggests Chagall, a strong layer of surreal humor runs through the work: a flautist serenades what appears to be a hippopotamus in a tree, a pig plays a kettle drum, a cockroach walks a tightrope, a fish stands in a doorway juggling, bumblebees surround a woman whose hat and dress resemble a honeycomb.

Her portraits, too, surprise with their wit. One woman wears a crown of apples, several other figures sport sailboats on their heads, and a cat wears a necklace. Flowers and plants are another favorite subject, these so naturally unusual that they need no adornment. Whatever the subject, her use of vibrant colors and the luminosity of the glass give the works an almost ethereal airiness.

Ms. Raacke’s other passion is theater. During the 1980s she worked with several avant-garde companies in New York City, among them La Mama and Lee Nagrin’s Sky Fish Ensemble. For the past 15 years she has been involved with the East End Special Players. “When I saw them at Guild Hall, I knew they were the people I wanted to work with.” 

At first she created the backdrops, then designed the costumes, and for the past few years has served as producer. Several of her paintings inspired “The Fish Juggler,” the company’s 2015 performance at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. “The kids chose five or six of my paintings, so I had to build everything I had painted in three dimensions, large enough so the actors could go inside the houses.”

The Raackes spent 10 years in New York before moving to Boston, where they worked in a color lab, he as a photographer, she as a receptionist. After two years there, they returned to New York at the same time as Mr. Raacke’s mother decided she wanted to move to East Hampton.

While visiting her in the Northwest Woods, they began to look for land and found the wooded, rolling property where they now live. “The land was so cheap that we decided we could buy it if we built the house ourselves. We built the studio first, then the house,” which is several hundred yards away. They moved in 1998.

The south wall of the passive-solar studio is Polygal, a double-walled polcarbonate that diffuses daylight and provides insulation. During a recent visit, the temperature outside was in the 40s, but the studio was warm from the sun. The house has solar panels in addition to its passive solar orientation. Their monthly electricity bill is $5.

Ms. Raacke’s sister lives in Munich, her brother in the village where they grew up. The three siblings are close and visit each other regularly. “My mother’s family were farmers,” she said. “But I did not inherit the green thumb.” Given her do-it-yourself history, it’s likely she could master gardening if she chose to.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will present “The Vendettas: Rock and Roll Holiday Spectacular” on Saturday at 8 p.m. The band, made up of Jay Janoski, Dave Doscher, and Lenny Brentson, has been together for six years, refining its repertoire of ’50s jukebox hits, rockabilly rarities, and contemporary material. 

The evening will also include the Holiday Horns, Chuck Ware on guitar, Erin Doherty, a vocalist, and plenty of “rocking holiday hits.” Tickets are $25 and can be purchased from the theater’s website.

“Winter Salon” at Drawing Room

“Winter Salon,” an eclectic installation of contemporary works by gallery artists juxtaposed with works on paper from the 18th and 19th centuries, will open Saturday at the Drawing Room in East Hampton and remain on view through Jan. 31.

Among the 26 gallery artists are John Alexander, Jennifer Bartlett, Jane Freilicher, Bryan Hunt, Laurie Lambrecht, Vincent Longo, Fairfield Porter, Raja Ram Sharma, Alan Shields, and Jack Youngerman. The older works include natural history drawings, European plein-air studies, decorative arts design, herbaria, and Beaux Arts watercolors.

The pairing of traditional art forms with contemporary work, central to the gallery’s program since its founding in 2004, invites viewers to look beyond conventional divisions in mediums and genres.

David Slater at Marcelle

“Dreams, Ghosts, and Blue Moons,” an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by David Slater, will open Saturday at the Peter Marcelle Project in Southampton with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will run through Jan. 3.

The exhibition will include works from Mr. Slater’s “Blue Moons” series, in which he starts a painting of the view from his house every time there is a “blue” moon, or roughly every three years. He has been working on the series since 1999.

Regarding the “Ghosts” series, Mr. Slater, who lives in Sag Harbor, said, “I live in a building built in 1890, and there are ghosts in this house.” In fact, he said, almost all the houses in his Rum Hill neighborhood have ghosts, some of whom, he speculates, might be found in a photograph of his building and its inhabitants from 1890.

New Lecture Series 

The Watermill Center has announced “Viewpoints @ 29th Street,” a new series of programs for artists and art enthusiasts that will take place at the New York City loft of Robert Wilson, the center’s founder and artistic director.

The initial program, “Off the Easel: Mitchell, Pollock, Rothko,” will bring together Christophe de Menil, Helen Harrison, and Laura Morris to discuss the works of the three pioneering artists next Thursday at 7 p.m. Christopher Stackhouse will moderate.

A designer, artist, and art collector, Ms. de Menil will discuss the work of Mark Rothko. Ms. Harrison is director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs. Ms. Morris is archivist for the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Mr. Stackhouse is a writer and artist who is an adjunct professor in the Curatorial Practice M.F.A. program at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Due to limited seating capacity, advance reservations have been encouraged.

Pollock’s Black Paintings

“Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots,” an exhibition of the artist’s black paintings, is on view through March 20 at the Dallas Museum of Art. The show includes 31 of the approximately 50 black paintings Pollock produced between 1951 and 1953.

According to Phyllis Tuchman, an art historian and critic, Pollock’s black paintings have been overshadowed by his monumental poured canvases but “are finally getting their time in the limelight. . . . Pollock rightly suspected the black paintings wouldn’t get their due.” 

In 1951, he wrote to Alfonso Ossorio, his friend and fellow artist, “I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black — with some of my early images coming through — think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing — and the kids who think it’s simple to splash a Pollock out.”

Robert Mehling at S.C.C.

The Southampton Cultural Center is presenting a retrospective of work by Robert Mehling, a painter who lives in Riverhead, through Dec. 28. Mr. Mehling, who holds an M.F.A. from C.W. Post College, paints primarily still lifes. While meticulously rendered, they are not without eccentricity and wry humor.

In one painting, a piece of cake, a couple of oranges, and a Wild Turkey figurine share a table with a Crock-Pot. In another, an Osterizer blender is rendered with the same care as less mundane subjects, and skulls figure in many of his paintings. In a statement on his website, Mr. Mehling writes, “I paint real things to reveal unseen essences, making selections to evoke memories and induce introspection in the viewer.”

Freilicher in Manhattan

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan will present “Jane Freilicher: Theme and Variations,” her first show at the gallery since her death last year, from today through Jan. 30. A reception will take place this evening from 6 to 8.

The gallery’s selection of paintings and works on paper will feature the subjects with which the artist is most closely associated — the views from her Greenwich Village apartment and her studio in Water Mill — as well as a selection of still lifes. According to the gallery, the paintings “act as a record of the ever-changing New York skyline and the disappearing open fields of the Long Island landscape.”

Craft Show at Ashawagh

“By Hand,” a show of work suitable for holiday gift-giving by 14 artisans, will be on view Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Ashawagh Hall in Springs.

The show will include pottery, jewelry, candles, watercolors, toys, felt hats, soaps and body lotions, wood carvings, baskets, and fiber art. There is no formal reception, but complimentary food and drinks will be available.

“Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue,” originally published in 2002 and just reissued by Phaidon Books, will be present for a book signing and sale of the book at the Antique Shop on Main Street in Bridgehampton on Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m.

“Grace” includes forewords by Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, and Karl Lagerfeld, the noted fashion designer, as well as personal accounts by Ms. Coddington of working as the magazine’s creative director with such iconic photographers as Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Bruce Weber, and the fashion-world personalities Naomi Campbell, Jerry Hall, and Manolo Blahnik, among others.

The 408-page book includes 310 color illustrations and is priced at $150.

“I’m very uninterested in subject matter,” Eugene Brodsky told a recent visitor to his East Hampton studio, although he has also said that “the sources for my work start from images I come across.” In his artworks, things are what they seem, and yet there’s more than meets the eye. 

“I try to make it hard for myself. I think my specialty has been finding the hard way to make things that absolutely don’t look hard to make.” His recent “Plans” series exemplifies this.

He has described those works as “essentially creating a jigsaw puzzle of silk,” a complicated process that includes drawing, collage, vector conversion, laser-cutting, inking, silk-stretching, pinning, and assembly — processes that, in the artist’s words, “remain mostly invisible to the viewer, who rightly just sees what’s there.” 

He does not like talking about his work, “although that can be frustrating for people who need to lock it into something. It’s like making music. If there were really some way you could describe your work that was really, really useful, you probably shouldn’t be making art or music to begin with. I think most people who love art look for something beyond words, beyond understanding in any literal way.”

With just three and a half weeks of formal art education, he had a show at the O.K. Harris Gallery in SoHo in 1970, his first, at the age of only 23. He was born in Manhattan into “sort of an artsy family. My mother was a painter, my father went to Yale Drama School.” He attended the High School of Music and Art, then left and went to Walden, “the go-to progressive school for those who couldn’t make it anywhere else.” 

Some teenage summers were spent at Buck’s Rock Performing and Creative Arts Camp in Connecticut, “which was part of a whole progressive syndrome you went through in the early ’60s, where you kind of see the creative life through the perspective of your teachers and your counselors and you go, ‘Oh my God, this is really scary.’ ”

He enrolled at George Washington University in 1963 with a plan to major in political science. Within two months, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. “It had an enormous impact on me, going from a city that was very glamorous and future-driven to this whole series of events and political wars and the civil rights movement. I got very engaged in all that and dropped out of school after two years.” 

Back in the city, he started to paint. Until that point, art “was an area where I sort of shone, as opposed to some other areas where I didn’t shine.” Very briefly, he attended the New York Studio School on Eighth Street. “You were supposed to work from the figure and evolve in the inevitable way of an atelier-type school, but I was down in the basement doing Ronald Bladen-type sculptures with cardboard and black tape.” (Bladen was one of the progenitors of Minimal Art.)

“I remember Leland Bell, who had been a student of Derain, saying, ‘How did you get in here, Brodsky?’ I was asked to make a commitment or get out, and I got out. That was my experience of art school.”

Mr. Brodsky recalled taking his slides to Ivan Karp, the director of O.K. Harris, “who at that point was sort of the Donald Trump of the art world. ‘These are great, these are fabulous,’ he said, and I remember telling my father about it and thinking ‘this is kind of nice.’ But from then on, it was hell.” 

In 1972, the artist moved from the West Village to SoHo. “I knew a lot of people, but my life experience as opposed to everybody else’s life experience in the art world was that my friends tended to be less successful, and the very successful people didn’t like me.” He was with the Cunningham Ward Gallery in the mid-1970s, as was Ross Bleckner, “but lots of people didn’t ‘get’ my work.”

From the beginning of his career, Mr. Brodsky has been focused on both image and process. Among the artists who have mattered to him are Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. “My work was also impacted by Eva Hesse and the whole period of making things that were painterly with nonpainterly materials.” 

He described his breakthrough work as the “child” of Hesse, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Stella, and Conrad Marca-Relli. “In my work of the mid-1970s, I used raw canvas and black Rhoplex and cut every line, instead of drawing every line. I followed the shape of what I was doing so it would have an irregular, Stella-like shape.”

He pointed to a work in a 1975 catalog as an example. “It was all canvas, cut and then joined. Forty years later, I’m still cutting and joining. Then I did what people do, I moved along and the art world moved along, and things that I had excluded from my art that I was very proud of excluding I found myself including, like figurative elements.”

From early in his career, Mr. Brodsky’s works have been complex compositions of different, sometimes dissonant components — a realistic Mickey Mouse “imprisoned” in a checkerboard-like grid, drum-like forms that faintly suggest the chocolate grinder in Duchamp’s “The Large Glass,” or a shape that suggests a piece of furniture but could be simply an abstract line.

More often than not, his forms and lines are suggestive but elusive, often paired with seemingly random elements such as a crudely drawn house, a realistic drawing of a prison camp, or a line drawing of a pregnant woman in profile.

“I photograph things,” he said when asked where his images came from. “What excites me, what I like to look at, what captures me. I have to trust that the integrating thread to all of my objects and all the images I do is that they appeal to me, they give me a starting point, they make me think, and they leave some room for me.” 

For the “Plans,” much of his research focused on the plans and drawings of early 20th-century European architects, among them Carlo Mollino and J.J.P. Oud, whose “drawings were very wonderful-looking and, at the same time, functional. A lot of the time the most arresting things I see around are not exactly art. They can be the sketches for an animation or a blueprint that’s crumbled at the edges and stuck together with tape, and this, to me, is really it.”

 “LCX,” one of the silk pieces from “Plans,” derived from a floor plan Le Corbusier made for an exhibition of paintings. “I get very remote from the starting point, from the initial image. My goal is to find examples where my vision works in tandem with another’s to produce something that is both new and at the same time intentionally bound to its beginnings. I’m often pulled toward the most casual image.”

He first came to the East End when he was 19 and “found out that artists went out there, and there was a Friday train with a bar car. I would be there with all these people whose names I don’t remember, drinking up a storm, and I loved it. There were cornfields next to the ocean, there was landscape and light.”

He began to rent during the summers when his daughters, Kate and Emma, now 34 and 30, were little. He and his second wife, Corry Kittner, a children’s-book illustrator, purchased their house on Accabonac Road, just east of the village, in 2001. “I move my studio here in May, and we stay as late as we can, which is late September or early October.” 

Small Works at Ashawagh

Fifteen local artists and photographers will exhibit small “gift-priced” works at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Participating artists are Carol Saxe, Frank Sofo, John Todaro, Dell Cullum, Philip Dobler, Annie Sessler, Pam Vossen, Debbie Palmer, Alyce Peifer, Dave Buda, Ursula Thomas, Lieve Thiers, Gene Samuelson, Rosa Scott, and Peter Gumpel.

Celebrating Women Artists 

“You Go Girl! Celebrating Women Artists,” an exhibition of work by 50 artists from the late 19th century to the present, is on view through April 3 at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington. Among the artists with past or present East End connections are Janet Culbertson, Miriam Dougenis, Audrey Flack, Elaine de Kooning, Mary Nimmo Moran, Betty Parsons, Miriam Schapiro, and Jane Wilson.

Carly Haffner Solo

The Ripe Art Gallery in Huntington is presenting an exhibition of new work by Carly Haffner through Jan. 30. Ms. Haffner, who lives in Sag Harbor, paints South Fork scenes and intersections, including views of her own property, in a colorful, naive style. A founding member of Bonac Tonic, the local art collective, she has exhibited frequently on the East End.

Sophia Brous and Carlos Soto, performance artists, will each share works in progress with the public on Saturday at the Watermill Center. Ms. Brous, an Australian performer who will be in residence at the center in January, will be gathering material from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for “Lullaby Movement,” a project exploring lullaby rituals from around the world that she is developing with David Coulter and Leo Abrahams, British musicians.

The project focuses on the ancient and contemporary lullaby repertoire in a work that is part song cycle, part interdisciplinary theater. In preparation, Ms. Brous is asking East End residents to contribute their own family or community lullabies in either one-on-one or group sessions on Saturday. She will return to the center in January with her musician-partners to develop the work into a full-length piece incorporating choreography, staging, and production design.

Mr. Soto, who is now in residence at the center, will open his studio from 7 to 8:30 p.m. to present “Everything Alright,” a musical theater work in progress for five performers, written with D.M. Stith, a singer-songwriter. The piece “revolves around the seemingly infinite variations of view and values centered on a traumatic event as perceived by a group of people” — in this case a community faced with the intrusion of a stranger.

As part of its intention to develop a vocabulary of indefinite subjectivity, its characters rotate among a group of performers, with no single person playing the same role throughout.

At 5 p.m., prior to Mr. Soto’s open studio, there will be a tour of the center’s grounds, library, study, and collection. All three events are free, but advance reservations are required.

As part of the celebration of its 10th anniversary, the center will also launch the “reAct” series, which will feature former residents in performance, with “Trisha Brown: In Plain Sight” on May 28. Other participants will include Jack Ferver and Paola Prestini. 

The Choral Society of the Hamptons will inaugurate its 70th anniversary season on Sunday at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church with performances at 3 and 5:30 p.m. Ottorino Respighi’s “Laud to the Nativity” will be the centerpiece of the program, which will also include shorter selections, among them medieval English carols, a Venetian polychoral work by Gabrieli, and Christmas music by composers including Vulpius and Praetorius.

Created between 1928 and 1930 by the Italian composer and musicologist best known for his Roman orchestral tone poems, “Laud to the Nativity” blends musical styles both antiquated and modern to render the sentiment of the Nativity story. Respighi was a scholar of Italian music from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, but he reached even further into the past for this piece, which is set to a medieval Italian pastoral text from the 13th century.

Heather MacLaughlin, a conductor and musicologist, has referred to the influence of Baroque opera, madrigals, church modes, and Gregorian chant on “Laud to the Nativity.” She also noted that the participation of a small chamber ensemble gives a sense of pastoral, even archaic, simplicity to the work. The piece was scored for chorus, three soloists, and a wind sextet. Its conclusion adds the modern sounds of piano four hand, triangle, and rich vocal harmony.

The title of the Christmas program, “A Rose in Winter,” refers to a “medieval expression for the Nativity and, in modern times, an evocation of humanity’s persistent capacity for hope,” according to a Choral Society press release.

The society’s music director, Mark Mangini, will conduct the concert, which will include two soloists from previous programs, Cherry Duke, a mezzo-soprano, and Nils Neubert, a tenor, Mizuho Takeshita, a soprano, and the South Fork Chamber Ensemble.  

Mr. Mangini has been one of New York City’s most active choral conductors for over 30 years and is a founder and music director of the Greenwich Village Chamber Singers. His repertoire ranges from the pre-Bach era, with historical instruments, to commissions of contemporary work.

Ms. Duke is a frequent soloist with opera companies throughout the United States, among them the Fort Worth Opera, Opera Tampa, the Indiana Repertory Theatre, and the Los Angeles Opera.

Mr. Neubert also performs widely in the U.S. and abroad and is a sought-after interpreter of lieder and the works of Bach, Mozart, Handel, Hayden, Mendelssohn, Rossini, and Donizetti. He is also a chamber musician. 

New to the choral society is Ms. Takeshita, a versatile performer of opera and oratorio, early and contemporary music, with a repertoire including Susanna in “Le Nozze di Figaro,” Despina in “Cosi Fan Tutte,” Gilda in Rigoletto, and Tytania in “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Tickets to individual concerts are $30 in advance and $35 at the door, $10 and $15 for youth. Preferred seats are available for $75, and season subscriptions can be had at discounted prices.

Prior to the 3 p.m. performance, the society will hold a benefit brunch at the Bridgehampton Inn and Restaurant at 12:30. Brunch tickets, which are $225, will include preferred seating at the concert.

Looking ahead, the society will perform Fauré’s “Requiem” and Bach’s Cantata No. 4, “Christ Lay in Death’s Bonds,” on March 20 at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. Next summer the society will present Beethoven’s Mass in C and the world premiere of a major work by Victoria Bond, based on the biblical story of Moses and commissioned by the society.

An auditioned chorus with a professional music director, soloists, orchestra, and accompanist, the Choral Society of the Hamptons has been presenting choral music on the East End since it was founded in 1946 by Charlotte Rogers Smith, a local choir director.

After opening a second location for his Southampton-based Tripoli Gallery this year in East Hampton, Tripoli Patterson might have been expected to do a larger than usual version of his annual “Thanksgiving Collective.” But few could have foreseen just how large that vision would become.

Unable to contain himself in just the two spaces, the young but veteran art dealer took over the Southampton Arts Center as well for the 11th edition. His annual amalgam of artists he has shown or wants to show has grown to fit the trebling of wall space with a number of emerging and established artists either new or known to the gallery.

Mr. Patterson took a smart approach to the more than 100 works he has included, multiple pieces by 35 artists. Rather than concentrating the work of each artist in one venue, he chose to spread them out over the three sites to make more thematic installations in each. There is no exact science here. The only constant appears to be that no one artist made it into all three venues, which was probably wise politics.

The result is a show(s) that feels like an extended conversation. Each can stand on its own but is enriched by the other. The whole is a personal version of an annual, biennial, or triennial-style show, a category also selective in nature, but more wide-ranging. In this instance, it serves as a showcase of one person’s eclectic associations with the art world as it intersects with his world.

The Southampton Arts Center, just by its sheer size, carries the most depth, breadth, and volume. Most of the largest two-dimensional and three-dimensional pieces ended up there from sheer logistics. It also boasts a number of outdoor sculptures in the garden.

It might seem facile to some, but the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s plaster busts on circular plinths are an effective takedown of the historical fetishization of classical art. That several 19th-century casts of such busts stand in the garden east of the former Parrish (and with no irony) makes the Bruce’s statues perfect foils for their staid presence. The newer casts have been coated with bright white enamel paint andembellished with primary colors and appliqués, including cigarettes, a trademark of the group’s work.

Their placement near the gallery’s windows draws an effective parallel to the statuary outside. They are unapologetically kitschy, and their mere presence calls out the unintended but literal kitschiness of the replicas. It’s a fun little conversation, not meant to be too weighty, that still has a lot to say.

The works of a number of artists not traditionally tied to the gallery are on view across the three spaces. Ross Bleckner can now be added to the roster of artists of international repute who have shown work in conjunction with the Tripoli Gallery. Mary Heilmann, Billy Sullivan, Robert Harms, Mike Kelley, Dan Colen, and Ahn Duong are some of the surprising or boldface names added to Tripoli’s usual roster. 

Yung Jake, Mr. Patterson’s brother, performed on opening night and contributed two sculptural pieces to the show. One is a Dumpster painted baby blue with decals of twisted Fiji bottles. Florescent lights placed inside give off an institutional glow, and a bit of spray paint depicts a smiley face and the word “Hi.” It is slick and rough at the same time, and kind of cute, for a Dumpster. His other piece in the show, on view in East Hampton, is more abstract and less visual. A rough piece of metal, abraded by rust pockmarks and faint lines, is enlivened by a Fiji sticker. 

From Southampton to East Hampton, there’s no discernible divide between figuration and abstraction that might have historically delineated aesthetics. Judith Hudson’s watercolors are more suggestive in Southampton than they are explicit in East Hampton. Mr. Harms’s abstract work stayed in Southampton mostly because his two paintings have a preppie palette.

New to me were Benjamin Keating and Brendan Lynch, both of whom have work that plays with the sculptural and the two-dimensional in the arts center. Mr. Keating slashes the canvas of paintings and then casts them as sculptures along with their frames. Mr. Lynch attached drawings, paintings, and found objects to a chain-link fence in a way that is vaguely familiar yet still fresh and eye-catching.

  Scott Covert has two powerful works, one canvas at the arts center and another in East Hampton. They consist primarily of tombstone rubbings that he silkscreens or paints or draws directly on canvas. In “Sports I,” at the arts center, he includes rubbings from Ty Cobb, Vince Lombardi, and a host of others in white and black mostly, but with some shots of purple and blue. Although the letters have meaning as names, he relates them visually to one another as well so that they form a full composition. 

A related work in East Hampton, “Blue Blue 2,” appears to focus on names from the blues. It is hanging near a Bruce High Quality Foundation oil on canvas painting called “Massacre of the Innocents” with a similar color scheme that also uses words as part of the composition.

Two of Mr. Colen’s untitled works using paint to look like accumulated guano are placed across the street from each other in Southampton, as are two of Matthew Clark’s surf-inspired photographs. But Mr. Bleckner’s vaguely floral paintings, Keith Sonnier’s large-format drawings, and Ms. Duong’s realistic paintings are found at the art center and in East Hampton. It’s a complicated calculus with no discernible rationale, but in the end it works well for each of the venues. The work on display goes together, and no single site seems to be the worse for it. 

So see one or see all, but it is worth checking out this year’s “Thanksgiving Collective.” It’s on view through Jan. 31.