Santa Fe Pro Musica’s Winter Orchestra Concert pairs two well-known works by Mozart and Manuel de Falla with two major pieces receiving their local premieres, Aaron Jay Kernis’ Earth, which sounds a warning about what we are doing to our only conceivable home, and the Symphony No. 2 by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-georges, a celebrated Black composer from the 18th century whose work is just now being rediscovered.

Kernis is one of America’s most honored composers, and he wrote Earth specifically for tenor Nicholas Phan, who performs it here. The 30-minute two-part work begins with a plaintive question sung a capella — “Why are the seasons no longer the seasons of before?” — that returns several times as a threnody (or lament) during the longer opening section.

It’s a question that had special resonance for Phan as he spoke during one of the recent storms that flayed California. “It feels so visceral and relevant and current,” he says. “I’m sitting under an atmospheric river right now and wonder if my house is going to wash away.”

The text for the first section of Earth is a three-part poem titled Seasons, which Phan describes as depicting a farmer’s experience with the land and how it changes as the climate changes. The tenor and conductor Sarah Ioannides both have first-person experiences with farming in their own heritages: Phan through a farm in Greece that still supplies the family with olive oil and Ioannides through a family farm in Wales.

“What’s really special here,” Kernis says, “is that the poet, Kai Hoffman-krull, is also a farmer himself and a researcher on sustainable farming practices.” The composer commissioned the poem, which tells a story, knowing it would be followed by an excerpt from William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a much more reflective work that Kernis finds “both beautiful and very, very sad and very dark at the same time.”

That sense of different emotions layered simultaneously is an aspect of the score that Phan and Ioannides both praised. “It made me think about Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis,” the tenor says, “even though it doesn’t sound like it at all . ... There are these intense layers of counterpoint and instruments playing off each other, and with the voice. It’s really magical.”

Kernis, who has been called “the preeminent orchestral showman of the age” by Gramophone, with his music

praised as “arresting, remarkable, with fearless originality and a powerful voice” by The New York Times, has often found inspiration in contemporary events and issues. The launching pad for him was “the absurdity and cruelty” of the Persian Gulf War, which led to his Second Symphony of 1991.

Other works followed — some overt and some covert in their subject matter and point of view — on topics including the Holocaust and other European genocides. His next piece to debut will be Edensongs, an oratorio that continues the exploration of our relationship to the Earth, on Feb. 19 at Yale University, where Kernis teaches.

After his Santa Fe performances, Phan travels to Hong Kong for Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and then immediately to the Grammy Awards, where he’s up for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, his second such nomination in four years. That album is Stranger — Works for Tenor by Nico Muhly has two local connections. Muhly is writing the orchestral arrangement for Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the Santa Fe Opera this summer, and the orchestra on Phan’s album consists of The Knights and the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, both of which were co-founded by Colin Jacobsen, Santa Fe Pro Musica’s new artistic director.

A virtuoso violinist, prolific composer, and conductor of one of Paris’ finest orchestras, Bologne was born around 1745 in the Caribbean territory of Guadeloupe, the son of a wealthy French planter and an enslaved woman from

Senegal. Very little is known about Bologne’s musical training, which took place in Paris, but it must have been first rate.

His music combines aspects of Mozart and Hadyn’s Viennese classicism with the elegant French style of the day. Ioannides chose the two symphonies for the program in part because of their parallels and contrasts. “These two works were written a couple of years apart, and not far from each other,” she says, “and they both make use of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) style to create drama in the music.” A key difference is Bologne’s use of French dance styles, which gives his symphony a more intimate quality, as does its lack of wind instruments.

The “Ritual Fire Dance” is often performed as an encore, but, here, the earthy, energetic piece opens the program. It comes from Falla’s ballet El Amor Brujo (Love the Magician), in which Candela, a widowed Andalusian woman, is haunted by her unfaithful husband’s ghost, with whom she dances every night. Attempting to exorcise the specter, which will allow her to marry her true love, Candela performs the fire dance at midnight, surrounded by her friends. (It doesn’t work, but the subsequent “Dance of the Game of Love” succeeds.)

The finale is Mozart’s Symphony No. 35, which was originally composed for the 1782 ennoblement ceremony of a childhood friend from Salzburg, Sigmund Haffner. Mozart was swamped with other projects at the time and wrote it in great haste, shipping the music off movement by movement from Vienna to his father in Salzburg, who had arranged the commission. Despite all that, it may have arrived too late to be performed at the celebration following Sigmund’s elevation.

Mozart was never impeded by modesty when it came to assessing the quality of his own work, and when he got the score back several months later, he wrote to his father, “My new Haffner symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every single note of it. It must surely produce a good effect.”

It’s an extroverted work that certainly does produce a good effect. “This is one of the very few symphonies where we actually know how Mozart wanted it played,” says Ioannides. “The first movement isn’t just marked as fast, it’s fast and with fire, which is a nice connection to the ‘Ritual Fire Dance.’”

The second movement is marked andante, a tempo indication that Ioannides believes is often misinterpreted as slow. Instead, it should have a sense of purposeful walking, “paralleling Haydn’s Clock Symphony,” she says. As for the final movement, “It’s not just written as ‘presto,’ which means very fast, but ‘as fast as possible.’”