By Pia Catton
NEW YORK — In the last year, conductor Kent Tritle has moved from the concert series “Sacred Music in a Sacred Space” to another called “Great Music in a Great Space.” A step down? Not exactly.
From 1989 to 2011, Mr. Tritle led the choir and orchestra at St. Ignatius Loyola, the Catholic church on Park Avenue where he launched the “Sacred Music” series. It became one of New York’s best choral and organ programs, drawing audiences as would any secular classical-music program in a concert hall. Naming the series in 1989, he’d borrowed a little from the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, home of the Episcopalian Diocese of New York, which until the 1990s hosted the “Great Music in a Great Space” series. With that program no longer active and the name freed up, he substituted “sacred” for “great” following a papal ruling on music presented in Catholic churches.
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