Eric Whitacre’s The Sacred Veil

Name: Eric Whitacre’s The Sacred Veil
Start: 2026-04-25T19:30:00-07:00
End: 2026-04-25T21:30:00-07:00
Location: Rose City Park United Methodist Church

Schedule

Sat Apr 25 2026 at 07:30 pm to 09:30 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Rose City Park United Methodist Church | Portland, OR

This concert will run approximately 70 minutes, without intermission.
The most recent collaboration between Eric Whitacre and poet/lyricist Charles Anthony Silvestri, The Sacred Veil captures the human experience through an intimate and compelling story of life, love and loss. Silvestri’s wife, Julie, died of ovarian cancer at age 36 in 2005, leaving two young children. Including texts from Silvestri, Whitacre, and Julie herself, the profoundly moving score tells a story of courtship, love, loss, and the search for solace.
The lyrics are also used to evoke Silvestri’s concept of a thin veil that separates the past from the future, the living from the dead, the temporal from the eternal. Whitacre’s profoundly moving score uses simple melodies played by the piano and a solo cello to provide a ground for the sometimes straightforward, sometimes soaringly complex choral parts.
The Sacred Veil is one of the most important musical works of our time, a work of cathartic and transformative art that captures the human experience, and that resonates universally for anyone whose grief—recent or deep-seated—has never completely found closure.
We hope you can join us for these special concerts that highlight how choral music can reach the heart and heal the soul.