Aaron Helgeson's The Book of Never takes its inspiration from the Novgorod Codex, a millennium-old document in which a monk desperately preserved the culture of a community being strangled by authoritarian rule. Just as the codex layers texts upon texts, Helgeson freely weaves fragments of its recovered Slavonic writing with words by defiant artists across eras: Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Angela Davis, Gertrude Stein, Thanhhà Lại, and Holocaust survivor André Singer. Set to music built from layered fragments of early Slavonic hymnody, the work unfolds as a continuous choral cycle performed here by The Crossing under Donald Nally. A powerful meditation on loss, resistance, and the endurance of language.