Our first concert of the season pays homage to Homage, featuring Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands, a powerful retelling of Buxtehude’s “Ad manus” movement from Membra Jesu nostri. Shaw’s music for choir and baroque string quintet is by turns unsettling, urgent and hopeful, reflecting on the way hands can hold a person, a people or a nation. Also on the program: the whirlwind polyphony of Media Vita, and Kerensa Briggs’ alluring tribute; music of Brahms, Lili Boulanger, and Britten’s masterpiece, Hymn to St Cecilia.