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Our 2024-2025 Season:
Transcendental Idealists
In Review
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At the outset to our season in September 2024, we asked Immanuel Kant's three questions. What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope for? This is our journey to find the answers. (We spent our season in the visual world of Rita Quattrocchi, whose "Salmons that way" [above] came to represent these questions.)
A look back at a dramatic year.
| | Opening our season on the campus of Gettysburg College. | | |
No Battles in Gettysburg!
Instead, a truly warm welcome from the terrific faculty and staff at Gettysburg College, as we kicked off our season in lovely Christ Chapel on this beautiful and historic Pennsylvania campus singing Gabriela Ortiz, Ayanna Woods, and Shara Nova. A new season singing music of some old friends.
Resolve to increase your discomfort!
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Album #34: Ways You Went
Still in the midst of our year as Musical America’s 2024 Ensemble of the Year, we leapt from our opening concert to our first of four album releases of the season. We teamed back up with our friends at PRISM Quartet for Martin Bresnick’s Self-Portraits 1964, from which we drew the album’s title, Ways You Went. Our 34th album, it features a work wildly popular with our audience: a live performance of Mason Bates’ Mass Transmission.
| | Our 34th album features spectacular original artwork from frequent collaborator Christopher St. John. | | We have friends in New York! | | |
Our now-annual Carnegie Hall show
We took more music of Gaby Ortiz (she’s all over our season!) to Carnegie in Can We Know The Sound of Forgiveness, which is based on art of James Drake, and produced and directed by Stephen Jiménez. After our Philadelphia preview at the Performance Garage, we dashed up to Zankel Hall with flutist Alejandro Escuer, a percussion quartet from the Frost School at the University of Miami, dancers of the Alvin Ailey School, and poetry of Benjamin Sáenz to give the work its New York premiere. The New York Times headline read, “A Choir Stands Out in a Multi-media Performance” and Zachary Woolfe went on to say, “this group’s amazing, immaculate sound, both ethereally light and almost tangibly present in the air.”
The Earth is not her name.
The Earth refuses to be tamed.
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Album #35: Meciendo
We like to think of PARMA/Navona Records as ‘our’ label; they carry the lion’s share of our catalogue and the range of styles in that catalogue is, well, leonine. So, when PARMA approached us with a compilation album of various composers, we jumped in – and the result is Meciendo. We were pretty tickled a month later, when The New York Times named it to its “5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now,” and mentioned our singers specifically: “The group is poised, lucid and luminous, supremely accurate and perfect for music in which sheets of translucent, jeweled sound seem to float over and past each other in slow motion.”
| | More great album art from our friends: this time, Santa Fe artist Paul du Coudray. | | |
Cloud Anthem
Idealists we are, indeed.
Our 2024 eve-of-the-election contribution was a new work from Michael Gilbertson with a film by Brett Snodgrass, based on a poem of Richard Blanco. The words, the music, the film all speak for themselves. (We’ll give the live, local premiere in Philadelphia in October.)
…a kingdom with no king,
a city with no walls, a country with no name,
a nation without any borders or claim. Until
we abide as one together in one single sky.
| | Our single Cloud Anthem features the art of the film's creator, Brett Snodgrass. | | | | |
A gift from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
November didn’t get off to such a good start for a lot of us, but we were soon reminded how much good there is in the world. We’re accustomed to people being really generous with us, but an entire week just to explore what it would be like to stage a concert-length work we’ve already premiered? Benevolent. Also, an investment in an important work that has already entered the canon: David Lang’s poor hymnal, which we are staging with Broadway and Metropolitan Opera choreographer/director Annie-B Parson. More on these developments to come. For now, we celebrate Chapel Hill, a fantastic week with their world-class staff, and a wonderful welcome from everyone at The Chapel of the Cross, where we sang to a packed sanctuary.
| | Annie-B guiding the poor hymnists. | | |
Recording Academy Update
We broke a record…with a record!
We were nominated a tenth time for a Grammy, giving us the (perhaps inconsequential) record for the most consecutive years of nominations in our category, Best Choral Performance: ten nominations in nine years. Ochre – music of George Lewis, Caroline Shaw, and Ayanna Woods. Read on to find out what happened next!
A thousand regrets at deserting you
| | Paul du Coudray's art again, bathed in ochre. | | |
A month of poor hymnal
Let’s start with Album #36: David Lang’s poor hymnal. Recorded at the time of its premiere a year before, we had been eager to release it because it is currently our most popular touring work. We’ve sung it in Philadelphia, Lincoln, Iowa City, Chapel Hill, Des Moines – and this coming season we’ll bring it to Boston Symphony’s Orchestra Hall and the Peace Center in Greenville, SC. Released in mid-December, we found ourselves again, a month later, on The New York Times list of “5 Classical Albums You Can Listen to Right Now,” with this gracious observation: “The canny chamber musicians of the Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally, oblige with smooth, dry-eyed luminosity that sustains a gently haunted air.”
| | Kevin's supertitle score and a sold-out house wait for poor hymnal to begin. | |
The Crossing @ Christmas 2025
The Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Concerts
But we weren’t finished with poor hymnal for December 2024. We reprised it a year after its world premiere, sang it twice in Philadelphia, and then made our debut at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center with it the Saturday prior to Christmas – a lovely, if humbling, holiday gift to us.
wherever charity is
is where we are
| | We hit the road again – Midwest or bust! | | Taking a bow at Richardson Auditorium for our McCarter Theatre show in Princeton. | | |
poor hymnal. poor hymnal. poor hymnal.
The work has truly, instantly, become a part of the American Choral Canon, confirmed by our four performances in February.
First, we drove up the street to Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, which presented us on the university campus at Richardson Auditorium. So many of us have connections to Westminster Choir College that a concert in Princeton always feels like coming home, just as poor hymnal is a return to something we love and know intimately.
| | A few days later, we headed West, spending a wonderfully cold and snowy week at the University of Iowa – another joyful academic luxury, made even better by the focus of our residency, the music of U of Iowa alumnus David Lang, who joined us for the week and for a performance of poor hymnal. | | U of Iowa's Kantorei joins us onstage to sing Bob Convery's music. | | The fantastic singers of UI’s Kantorei joined us on some movements of Bob Convery’s VOYAGES, and we read new works from UI graduate student composers, written for us. Thanks to Donald’s former teacher Ann Howard Jones for making our residency and Iowa debut a reality. | | Another dramatic setting: Plymouth-First in Lincoln, NE. | | Then we drove poor hymnal around a bit, with a first stop at historic Sheslow Auditorium (site of the Iowa caucuses), presented by Drake University. More snow and a delightful crowd of students made this brief stay memorable. Next, on to Lincoln to make our Nebraska debut, presented by the visionary folks at Abendmusik, whose home base First Plymouth Congregational Church is an acoustic wonder! | | |
look at your heart
right now
is it open?
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The mysteries of the universe (and of our lives)
In the midst of all this, we took a short break from poor hymnal and presented a concert of new works at our home, the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. Sebastian Currier joined us for the world premiere of his galactic, thought-provoking Mysterium, in which we ponder the vastness of the universe in relief to our life trajectories and intimate relationships. Through soaring vocal lines and an electronic soundtrack, we asked, “What role does randomness play in all of this?” We also gave the American premiere of Linda Catlin Smith’s marvelous Emily Dickinson settings, Folio.
We write its history, you and me, star by star, line by line.
| | Much of the Ochre team, including George (center) and Ayanna (right). | | |
The Grammy story, continued.
(We’re still in February)
Ochre wins, giving us our fourth Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance. Thanks to the rich and compelling music of Caroline, Ayanna, and George, to our producing team, and to a community of fearless singers!
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Your concentration is a large array,
where debris in the mind appears in an intense shower of heat radiation,
like a cluster of instincts to the body.
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Boston Debut (we’re still in February)
We opened yet another show in the final days of the month, making our Boston Symphony Orchestra debut at Symphony Hall singing Gaby Ortiz’s Revolución Diamantina (which had just won three Grammy Awards!) Eight intrepid women of The Crossing embodied the defiant protesters of this story of empowerment; another of Gaby’s feminist works, this one inspired by the uprisings against violence to women in Mexico.
The BSO staff and orchestra made us feel instantly at home, and Giancarlo Guerrero’s virtuosic conducting led us through three performances of this amazing score. Boston Classical Review noted that the singers of The Crossing “delivered their parts with brio, be they whispered, chanted, or sung; the score’s vocal effect…spoke potently. So did the collective’s contributions to the prayer-like final scene, whose pure-toned canons conveyed strength, resilience, and catharsis.”
We want to be free
Not one more
All of them
| | Gaby and Gary discuss things revolution while Giancarlo, the BSO, and we work onstage. | | Nina, Dynasty, and a crowd of friendly observers join us to explore Nina's new piece for us in March's workshop. | | |
Nina Shekhar Preview
A quieter month and a good time for a workshop. Nina Shekhar brought the first movement of her new work, Tic-Talk, premiering in October, written for us and pianist Dynasty Battles who played a MIDI keyboard as we explored Nina’s compositional idea. We had a big crowd of friends and supporters join us to observe and hear Nina’s thoughts on the process, and then, in Crossing style, we hung out at a reception afterward and discussed our excitement for the upcoming premiere. (Thanks Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting for making this piece happen!)
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At Which Point – Album #37
We can’t seem to get enough of Ayanna Woods. Nor Wang Lu or Tawnie Olson. So, we brought them together on an album for New Focus Recordings that we named for Lu’s piece, based on the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander. The album is a journey, for sure, exploring the depths of grief, capitalism’s effects on our self-perspective, and, well, what we do: art (form, color, creation).
At which point the driver turned and said it doesn’t need to be
your fault for it to break you.
| | Art by another long-time collaborator, Elizabeth Haidle – coincidently, Paul du Coudray's sister! | | |
The Month of Moderns in Philadelphia and New York
Gavin Bryars’ The Last Days of Immanuel Kant is one of those pieces that, when we’re rehearsing it, we know we’re in the middle of something bigger than us, not just because it’s a full concert-length unaccompanied work, not just because it addresses the decline of one of the great minds of the 18th century (perhaps of all centuries), but because the combination of words and music remind us of our humanity and of those aspects of life that are beyond our understanding. We were grateful to long-time friend Tony Creamer for supporting the creation of this piece, which drew a bold headline from The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Philadelphia’s The Crossing choir’s New York concert moves you enough to care about Immanuel Kant.”
The starry heavens above me and the moral law within.
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Back to New York:
an Aaron Helgeson Reprise
We love Aaron’s The Book of Never and find that, with the daily diminution of our constitutional protections, this work’s relevance increases. In late June, we took the The Book of Never into the studio, recorded it for future release, and then presented its NYC premiere at St. Peter’s Church, Lexington Avenue (where we’ll be again on December 20!). A meaningful reunion with a friend and his detailed, thoughtful musical response to our world.
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…all my hidden life…
I’m lost in me
I will need…
…my love…
| Another recording wraps, with Aaron Helgeson far left, and Summer Associate Christian Johnson, far right. | | |
Barnes and a Farewell to a Friend
Amidst these intense projects, we fit in some June events that were particularly poignant for us. The first, an appearance at the Barnes Foundation, singing for its patrons in front of some of the collection's most important works. (We may have even sung some historical music in front of Picasso, Cezanne, and Seurat!) Later in the month, we sang in a very special memorial on The High Line in Manhattan for Ric Scofidio, who, partnering with his wife Liz Diller, was one of the world’s most important architects. It was an honor to revive some of David Lang’s music written for The Mile Long Opera on the High Line (a Diller Scofidio + Renfro project) and to celebrate the life of such a wonderful and creative man.
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A final recording before a break: Christopher Jessup
We teamed up with PARMA composer Christopher Jessup (whose music is heard on our album, Meciendo – see above) to record his three-movement Astronomia, in which he sets our most-often-sung poet, Walt Whitman. A summarizing cap to our season: great poetry, sensitive music, collaborating in our comfort zone – a bunch of recording artists doing what we do, before saying farewell till September. (OK, we did just release a single from our upcoming album, Farming, so we’re not exactly taking a break!)
I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
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Questions Persist
Every time we set out to answer questions we find that we're much more interested in the questions than the answers! Still, we feel we achieved some clarification to Kant's musings, at least for us, in this little moment, on this little spot in the universe.
What can I know?
Not a lot. But we do know this; words matter. And how we use them in singing matters a lot.
What ought I do?
This is more universal; use your talents to ask more questions, know ourselves better, and speak truth to power.
What may I hope for?
We don't think for a minute that music itself can change the world, but we do hope that it can change us - that we become better people through listening, and that, by listening, we can reduce the noise and raise the integrity of the dialogue. Challenging? Sure. But Kant said 'hope,' and that's about all we got.
| | OUR “2025-2026 SEASON: OF BEING NUMEROUS” IS EVEN BIGGER! | | |
Summer Thanks
As always, we thank Carol Westfall for ensuring that our albums get recorded and released. We thank Peter and Judy Leone for supporting our Resident Composer program. We thank Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting for their ongoing support of our many commissions. We thank the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The Anne M. and Philip H. Glatfelter, III Family Foundation, The Neubauer Family Foundation, the Charles L. Siler Charitable Trust, The Presser Foundation, the BMI Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (or what was the NEA), Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and our Visionary supporters Josephine and Lester Hensley, Shawn Felton, Oliver Hoig, Kathy Taylor and Jon Sprogell, Barbara and Theodore Aronson, Barbara and Jerome Glickman, Ruth and Sidney Rosenblatt, Anne and Dennis Wentz, Anthony B. Creamer III, Peggy & Mark Curchack, Sandy & Bill Bixby, Susan Vigilante and Lori Hoppman, Cindy Jarvis, the Board of The Crossing, and many, many more individuals who form our community of generous, dedicated friends.
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