Beloved

Composer and jazz pianist Billy Childs’ half-hour work In the Arms of the Beloved, premiered in 2023, memorializes the life of his mother. It pulls together many of the strands in Childs’ multifaceted musical personality, and features violinist Anne Akiko Meyers with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Lyris Quartet, and a jazz quintet with Childs himself on piano. The violin is the mother’s voice in Childs’ conception, and a plangent Meyers solo sounds a meditative note in the piece’s opening paragraph. A poem by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian writer, provides the text, shared by the eloquent Los Angeles Master Chorale and jazz singer Luciana Souza. Childs’ music mixes passages of palpitating velocity with episodes of poetic contemplation, with jazz and classical influences dovetailing memorably together. Tenderly expressive performances of Eric Whitacre’s Seal Lullaby and Ola Gjeilo’s Serenity serve to underline the high quality of the choral singing and Grant Gershon’s sensitive conducting.