John Luther Adams' stunning work w/ The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin at the Philadelphia Orchestra's summer home. Lying at the center of Vespers of the Blessed Earth are the “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” a sung list of several hundred endangered and vanished living things—a response to the previous movement, a “Brief Descent into Deep Time,” which reminds us that our species occupies a nearly unnoticeable blip in the awesome, wondrous time/space expansion of which we are a part.