Washington Square Music Festival With West Village Chorale Among seasonal series that fill New York's parks with classical sounds each summer the Washington Square Music Festival, founded in 1953 by the violinist Alexander Schneider and the Washington Square Association, is among the more enduring. The concert it presented on Tuesday evening opened its 54th season. And in its way the festival is one of the more ambitious offerings of its kind; offbeat repertory items and unusual guests regularly turn up on its programs. Washington Square Music Festival David Oei performing Tuesday with the West Village Chorale and the Festival Chamber Ensemble at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church. It was for that reason, more than any other, that on a pleasant early-summer evening the festival presented "Music and Poetry in Greenwich Village" in its rain-date alternative location at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church on Avenue of the Americas. Yes, the park is still undergoing construction and its attendant inconveniences. But that has also been the case during several recent summers, in which the festival nevertheless drew overflow crowds into its designated parcel of turf. According to Peggy Friedman, the festival's executive director, the move indoors was prompted by the concert's guest artists, the West Village Chorale, and by an especially sensitive piece programmed by Lutz Rath, a cellist and the festival's music director. That work, "Svyati," by the British composer John Tavener, appeared in the concert's second half. Before that, Michael Conley conducted the chorale, a proficient volunteer chorus that recently concluded its 40th-anniversary season, and the Festival Chamber Ensemble in two poetic American works. "Fern Hill," a Dylan Thomas setting, shows the composer John Corigliano at his most sentimental, with undulant strains reminiscent of Barber and Copland. Here the piece showcased the chorale's well-blended sound and eloquent playing from the principal winds. "This Bequest of Wings," an ambitious, handsome nine-movement work composed by Mr. Conley and based on texts by Emily Dickinson, was tuneful and consonant, but piquant, surprising harmonies keenly illuminated Dickinson's mix of plain-spoken language and otherworldly disposition. Here and in the Corigliano the soprano Lucia Hyunju Song was an appealing soloist. In "Svyati," a setting of Russian Orthodox liturgy sung in Old Slavonic, the foremost voice was that of Mr. Rath's cello, sounding a wordless paean atop choral lines that rose and fell with pious sobriety. Passing scuffs in the performance hardly mattered; Mr. Tavener's music depends more on passion than on precision. Would that the same could be said of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy in C minor, in which patchy instrumental intonation blemished an otherwise sturdy account. The pianist David Oei played with refinement and vitality, occasionally threatening to barrel off the rails during climactic passages. And Mr. Conley endowed this rare example of third-rank Beethoven with first-rate conducting. The Washington Square Music Festival continues Tuesday at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, 371 Avenue of the Americas, at Waverly Place, Greenwich Village; (212) 252-3621, washingtonsquaremusicfestival.org.