Robert Kyr's "A Time for Life" explores the urgent issue of ecological crisis through texts from the Greek Orthodox Service of the Environment, the Bible, and Native American songs, chants, and prayers. “Robert Kyr’s moving and elegiac oratorio… pleads: ‘May it be beautiful before me, behind me, below me, above me, all around me. In beauty, it is finished.’” Vocal ensemble Cappella Romana combines passion with scholarship in its exploration of early and contemporary music of the Christian East and West. Its name refers to the medieval Greek concept of the Roman oikoumene (inhabited world), which embraced Rome and Western Europe as well as the Byzantine Empire of Constantinople (“New Rome”) and its Slavic Commonwealth.