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What does resistance sound like?
More than 150 New Yorkers are about to offer an answer at Lincoln Center, through a work written nearly 90 years ago that can feel startlingly close to our own moment.
On Monday, October 26 at 7:30 p.m., the New York Choral Society (NYCHORAL), in partnership with the Mannes School of Music, will bring Sir Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time to David Geffen Hall. The performance opens NYCHORAL’s new season and comes just one week before the 2026 midterm elections.
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Tippett began writing A Child of Our Time as Europe descended into fascism and in response to the events surrounding Kristallnacht in 1938. But he wasn’t interested in simply retelling history. He was wrestling with a much larger question: If every one of us is capable of both darkness and light, what happens when fear, anger and hatred take over?
Nearly nine decades later, it is a question that has lost little of its urgency.
Yet A Child of Our Time is not a work of despair. Tippett wove five African American spirituals into the score, including “Steal Away,” “Deep River” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” using them as moments of reflection and shared humanity. Across the evening, the music travels from violence and division toward understanding, reconciliation and, ultimately, hope.
And you don’t need to know anything about classical music to feel its impact.
The performance will bring together more than 150 NYCHORAL singers, the Mannes School of Music Orchestra, and four acclaimed soloists from the Mannes voice faculty: soprano Laquita Mitchell, mezzo-soprano Margaret Lattimore, tenor William Burden and baritone Stephen Powell. NYCHORAL Music Director David Hayes will conduct.
“To perform a work as profound and urgently relevant as A Child of Our Time in David Geffen Hall is an incredible privilege,” said Ellen PutneyMoore, NYCHORAL’s executive director. “At a moment when many of us are searching for connection and hope, Tippett reminds us that music has the power to bear witness, challenge injustice and bring people together.”
The timing gives the performance another layer of resonance. With Americans heading to the polls just one week later, NYCHORAL sees the concert as a chance for New Yorkers to gather and consider where we have been, where we are now, and what we carry forward together.
That sense of gathering is particularly fitting for NYCHORAL. Founded in New York in 1959, the chorus is made up of auditioned volunteer singers from across the city. By day, they are physicians, teachers, attorneys, baristas, nonprofit leaders, engineers, artists, students and retirees. On October 26, they will step together onto one of New York’s most celebrated stages to sing a work about what happens when a society fractures and about the possibility of finding our way back to one another.
The New York Choral Society and Mannes School of Music perform Sir Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time and Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler on Monday, October 26 at 7:30 p.m. at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
