Philadelphia Orchestra world premiere with Crossing choir is lush sound design

Whether or not you believe music has the capacity to prod the human race into saving itself, you couldn’t help but bask in the groovy, sincere vibe of Thursday night’s world premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Crossing choir. In Vespers of the Blessed Earth, John Luther Adams doesn’t preach. He simply lays out the facts, like having singers intone the names of endangered flora and fauna (“Franklin’s Bumblebee,” “Qiaojia Pine,” “Human”).

A certain melancholy sets in from the repetitious descending figures written into much of this new score — the cumulative effect of which slows down time and quite effectively focuses the listener on the damage we continue to do to our home and ourselves.

It’s perhaps that same kind of immersive feeling that won Adams a fan from another genre. “His music moved Taylor Swift. It’ll move you, too,” the Philadelphia Orchestra smartly put in the subject field of a recent email wooing potential ticket buyers. Swift was so moved by the Seattle Symphony’s recording of Adams’ mesmerizing Become Ocean that in 2015 she pledged $50,000 to the orchestra.

Vespers of the Blessed Earth is no Become Ocean, which swaddles its listener in orchestral mass and glints of ever-changing prisms. That piece, which won the composer the Pulitzer Prize in 2014, is so lush it sometimes sounds like it’s made of one-chord clips from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé elongated and unable to move to the next note.

Blessed Earth deploys a similar technique, but only briefly. More often it’s more like sound design than composition, particularly in the first two movements. That’s not meant as a slight. Adams, was introduced by narrator Charlotte Blake Alston, is a smart judge of the listener’s emotional clock, and those first two movements — “A Brief Descent into Deep Time” and a “A Weeping of Doves” — set up something wondrous. Their monotony and asceticism give way to a movement of great poignance. In “Night Shining Clouds,” the strings outline a kind of spare ghost melody.

Adams’ colorful use of percussion and his sense of theater and spatial exploration — he places some instrumentalists out in the house — make the composer in this piece something of a musical cousin to George Crumb. Mahler is a reference point in “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” which here featured the astonishingly beautiful soprano voice of Meigui Zhang in a wordless part. Piccolo and bells, heard through an open door from Verizon Hall’s acoustical chamber, ended the piece in a wispy moment suggesting the promise of regeneration.

Philadelphia’s Crossing choir also astonished with its accuracy and trademark purity of sound. The group’s leader, Donald Nally, was called upon to lead the performance — giving him an unexpected Philadelphia Orchestra conducting debut — after orchestra music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin called in sick. With economical but effective gestures, he was an ideal advocate for this music, and especially so in those moments when Adams’ writing called for something more expressive.

The surround-sound sensation of the piece was so vivid you wished the instrumentalists out in the hall had kept their spots for Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. But musicians do need to hear each other, particularly in a piece for as many players as this one, and so the stage it was. Marin Alsop conducted the work with energy and clarity, though you sensed that there might be an even sharper performance in its future.

Additional performances: Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in Verizon Hall, Broad and Spruce Sts. Tickets are $10-$168. philorch.org, 215-893-1999.