New from Kile Smith, Apollonian affinities

PRINCETON - Two different Apollos - the mythical god of light and sky and the series of modern, moon-bound spacecraft - rubbed shoulders, bumped heads, and somehow melded in Kile Smith's dauntingly high-concept new choral work,

The Consolation of Apollo

, premiered this weekend by the Crossing choir.

Heard Saturday at the Institute for Advanced Study (and repeated Sunday in Philadelphia), the piece alternates between texts by the sixth-century philosopher Boethius contemplating the nature of the universe from a down-here-on-Earth perspective, and transcripts of what the Apollo 8 astronauts said while taking in the awe-inspiring views of Earth from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968.

It was written as a companion to David Lang's Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion (2007), which retells Hans Christian Andersen's story of an abused girl who freezes to death on New Year's Eve. Both are for voices and spare percussion.

Got all that?

The important part is that Smith has seized the Apollo concept (suggested by Crossing founder/director Donald Nally) to create his most consistently high-level work, though one in which the composer of his breakthrough 2008 Vespers is barely recognizable.

Sacred choral works often seem required to have an open-ended quality, a point at which the composer only speculatively imagines the unimaginable. In contrast, Smith's Apollo arises from a clear vision and sure purpose without losing any of its otherworldliness.

The Boethius movements are more straightforward in their word settings, with harmonies that are subtly alert to meaning and that have gentle counter-melodies framing the music's primary message. The Apollo astronauts did what Boethius only dreamed of, reporting that the heavens are even more breathtaking than the ancients imagined, but in extremely colloquial language that Smith animates with freer, more fluid music. Each polarity in this piece sharply illuminates the other, coming together in ways that I'll leave future audiences to discover (because this piece indeed has a future).

Initially, I wondered whether Lang's piece should go first. Its renegade spirituality reaches for new, personal, and fragmented means of expression in his post-minimal musical language, and Smith's work is about musical and philosophical consolidation. But then, Lang's telling of the match girl's story, with halting recitatives and chorale-like interludes, arrived with particular pathos Saturday under Nally's direction that would be hard for any composer to follow.

One odd observation: In most of Lang's movements, series of repeated notes embedded in the texture began sounding as though they could be coded communication from distant satellites - wan but still coming through.

Together, these two pieces represent their own rediscoveries of the Christmas season through routes that are all the more effective for being so unanticipated.