Donald Nally

The Crossing & Donald Nally – Motion Studies (2024) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally, returns to Navona Records with MOTION STUDIES: Justine Chen’s Shallow Breath and Stealth and Nicholas Cline’s watersheds.

Reflecting on a culture where data mining and government traceability have become normalized to the point of population complacency, Chen captures poet Jena Osman’s musings on the 21st-century reframing of paranoia, privacy, and the pervasive desire to run away from the data that follows us. Evidence of these reflections is present in the tittering, sometimes whispering, sometimes soaring, and often frantic utterances of the ensemble in an unnerving collection of sequences that paint an antagonistic image of the modern machine.

(more…)

The Crossing & Donald Nally – David Shapiro: Sumptuous Planet (A Secular Mass) (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 28, 2023 · Comments off

Composer David Shapiro and The Crossing release Sumptuous Planet: A Secular Mass, a work that extols a science based stance on the universe and the nature of existence while using a musical form that is firmly rooted in the Christian Mass. In this way, Shapiro straddles an interesting line, acknowledging and participating in the awe and reverence that musical masses are designed to express, while diverging from the tradition of associating that awe with belief in a divine being.

(more…)

The Crossing & Donald Nally – The Tower and the Garden (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 27, 2023 · Comments off

This 2021 album marks the 23rd release by the small choir The Crossing, and increasingly, there are signs that the group’s renown is penetrating beyond its native U.S. Consider the album’s opening track, a setting of a Walt Whitman poem by composer Toivo Tulev, commissioned with support from Estonia’s Ministry of Culture. Listeners uncertain about the contemporary content of The Crossing’s recordings might gravitate toward the other two pieces on the album, which are more tonal, but Tulev’s work offers a fascinating perspective on Whitman’s writing, and it displays the talents of The Crossing at their most attractive. Always a virtuoso ensemble, the group has evolved into one of the most skilled choirs in North America, and it would be hard to find a better example than the frequent half steps in this piece with its drone-like choral chords punctuated by deliberate enunciations of the text. The pieces by Gregory Spears and Joel Puckett fit with The Crossing’s general focus on environmental and spiritual themes but take it in unique new directions. The Spears work takes up texts that suggest “ways in which Catholic thoughts and imagery might challenge the technological status quo,” while Puckett’s piece uses words spoken by members of a tribal group from Botswana. All of the music is absorbing, and the choir is well supported by Navona’s engineers in a resonant acoustic from Pennsylvania’s Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. For those unfamiliar with The Crossing, this release makes a fine, distinctive place to start with this choir and the unique corner of the choral music universe it has explored.

(more…)

The Crossing & Donald Nally – Gavin Bryars: A Native Hill (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 27, 2023 · Comments off

Navona Records presents A NATIVE HILL from Philadelphia’s professional chamber choir, The Crossing. This monumental unaccompanied work is the result of a collaboration with composer Gavin Bryars, whose previous work for The Crossing won them their first of two recent Grammy awards. With intimate knowledge of the individual voices and art of each singer, Bryars composed A NATIVE HILL to capitalize on the group’s unique sound, personality, and esprit de corps. A NATIVE HILL is based on American author and environmentalist Wendell Berry’s 1968 essay of the same name, which examines bucolic elements of rural life, suffused with deeper metaphysical and political implications. The new album is full of rich, complex vocal textures, dense chromatic clusters, and moments of profound simplicity, offering an opportunity to reflect on life’s timeless questions.

(more…)

The Crossing & Donald Nally – Carthage (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 27, 2023 · Comments off

The latest installment in a multi-album series with Navona Records, CARTHAGE offers six striking pieces by composer James Primosch that confront the most elemental questions of Western philosophy. Internationally recognized and prolific, Primosch is the 2020 winner of The Virgil Thomson Award for Vocal Music from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

(more…)

The Crossing & Donald Nally – Rising w/ The Crossing (Live) (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 27, 2023 · Comments off

Grammy award-winning, Philadelphia-based new music choir The Crossing releases its 22nd commercial recording, Rising w/ The Crossing. This unusual collection of live recordings from the ensemble’s extensive archive was selected by conductor Donald Nally for the ensemble’s 60-part series of daily releases, launched in March 2020 as an immediate response to the 2020 pandemic. That series is now archived by The Library of Congress as “an important part of the historical record” and lives on through this album of twelve remarkably varied and polished performances that capture the urgency and immediacy of The Crossing in concert. Featuring music by David Lang, Joby Talbot, Êriks Ešenvalds, Paul Fowler, Ted Hearne, Santa Ratniece, Alex Berko, and movements from Dieterich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri, the album is an expression of solidarity and community in the time of COVID. The Crossing is joined by the International Contemporary Ensemble for movements of Lang’s the national anthems, and early-music ensemble Quicksilver for the Buxtehude tracks.

(more…)

The Crossing & Donald Nally – Kile Smith: The Arc in the Sky (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · October 27, 2023 · Comments off

Professional chamber choir The Crossing moves listeners with their new release THE ARC IN THE SKY, a breathtaking performance of the eponymous work by accomplished choral composer Kile Smith. Based on texts by Robert Lax (1915–2000), it constitutes an American pilgrimage into spirituality.

(more…)

Shara Nova, The Crossing, Donald Nally – Titration (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · June 1, 2023 · Comments off

TITRATION: a term used in chemistry to describe the process where two reagents are mixed drop by drop to avoid the explosive reaction that would occur from pouring them together quickly. Titration is also used to describe a therapeutic process in which one approaches trauma very slowly, “drop by drop,” so as to avoid unnecessary distress, flooding and potential re-traumatization. No title could be better fitting for Shara Nova’s new cycle of healing songs, recorded by The Crossing with conductor Donald Nally. TITRATION examines the experience of our own bodies, the capacity of our nervous systems, and the quest to identify and embrace our most difficult feelings. Styles converge, warm sounds emerge and voices soar next to laughter, humming, and the energy of Shara’s Indie band roots, with songs deeply inspired by Resmaa Menakem’s Somatic Abolitionist body of work and his call for communal practice. TITRATION offers a glimpse into various healing modalities while extending a hand of self-awareness to listeners alike.

(more…)

The Crossing & Donald Nally – Carols After a Plague (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · December 30, 2022 · Comments off

Throughout its history, the Philadelphia based contemporary chamber choir The Crossing, led by conductor Donald Nally, has championed works that address social, political, and environmental issues. So it is consistent with the group’s history and mission that their latest release, Carols After a Plague, takes a broad view of our collective experience of the recent pandemic era, inviting twelve composers to look inward and engage with some of myriad ways in which the last few years have forced all of us to confront difficult realities and gain strength from solidarity with one another. The result is a moving tribute to the resilience of communities and a clarion call to renew our collective commitment to justice.

(more…)

Donald Nally, PRISM Quartet & The Crossing – Gavin Bryars: The Fifth Century (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 29, 2022 · Comments off

“The Fifth Century” was commissioned by American choir The Crossing and marks the return of composer Gavin Bryars to ECM after 24 years. The vocal ensemble is joined by saxophone quartet Prism on the large-scale work that sets a text from English poet and theologian Thomas Traherne, who remained unknown for over 200 years. The album also features Two Love Songs, two settings of Petrarch sonnets for unaccompanied female choir.

(more…)

The Crossing & Donald Nally – Born (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · November 5, 2022 · Comments off

Contemporary music needn’t sacrifice order and aesthetic appeal, even when it deals with complex issues. A glowing example of this is BORN: THE MUSIC OF EDIE HILL AND MICHAEL GILBERTSON, with conductor Donald Nally leading GRAMMY-winning professional chamber choir The Crossing on a breathtakingly beautiful expedition into themes of extinctions, relationships and their complexities, loss, and love.

Throughout this splendid amalgamation of Hill’s and Gilbertson’s ethereal, energetic, raw, and impactful compositions, the nuance of Nally’s conducting, and The Crossing’s superb expressiveness are ever-present. Singing that is transcendent and authentic.

(more…)