The Crossing & Donald Nally – Motion Studies (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:08 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona Records
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.
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The Crossing & Donald Nally – David Shapiro: Sumptuous Planet (A Secular Mass) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:44 minutes | 1,32 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © New Focus Recordings
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.
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The Crossing & Donald Nally – The Tower and the Garden (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:05:55 minutes | 697 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona
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.
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The Crossing & Donald Nally – Gavin Bryars: A Native Hill (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:36 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona
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.
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The Crossing & Donald Nally – Carthage (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 53:41 minutes | 912 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona
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.
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The Crossing – Words Adorned (Live) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 48:49 minutes | 824 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona
GRAMMY-winning choir The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, today released its 25th commercial album, WORDS ADORNED, on Navona Records. WORDS ADORNED features The Crossing with the Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture’s Takht Ensemble – led by Hanna Khoury, who served as musical coach for the project – and Palestinian vocal soloist Dalal Abu Amneh in commissioned works by Kareem Roustom and Kinan Abou-afach inspired by Andalusian poetry, and the traditional muwashshah When He Appeared by Muhammad ‘abd al-Rahim al Maslub.
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The Crossing & Donald Nally – Rising w/ The Crossing (Live) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:10:54 minutes | 685 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © New Focus Recordings
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.
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The Crossing & Donald Nally – Kile Smith: The Arc in the Sky (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:49 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona
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.
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Shara Nova, The Crossing, Donald Nally – Titration (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 51:37 minutes | 916 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona
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.
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PRISM Saxophone Quartet, The Crossing – The Fifth Century (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 50:11 minutes | 778 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM New Series
The music of English composer Gavin Bryars has long managed the distinction of being both “defiantly personal” (The New York Times) and “utterly accessible” (The Guardian). A deep yet unsentimental emotional resonance and a patient, contemplative view of time – whether relating to harmonic rhythm or human experience – are complementary characteristics that run through his instrumental, vocal and theatrical catalogue like a red thread, the composer inspired by disparate spirits from Wagner and Satie to Cage and Silvestrov. The ECM New Series released multiple recordings of Bryars’ music in the 1980s and early ’90s, including the classic albums After the Requiem and Vita Nova. The first full ECM album from Bryars in decades is The Fifth Century, which includes the seven-part title work: a slowly evolving – yet immediately involving – setting of words by 17th-century English mystic Thomas Traherne, performed by the mixed choir of The Crossing with saxophone quartet PRISM. The album also features Two Love Songs, luminous a cappella settings of Petrarch for the women of The Crossing.
Both Two Love Songs and The Fifth Century underscore the primacy of gradually unfurling melody in Bryars’ music, the quality that both deepens his works and makes them distinctly approachable. He learned the art of vocal music by working closely with singers, especially The Hilliard Ensemble (including for such albums as Vita Nova). “I spent a lot of time with The Hilliards, particularly John Potter,” he recalls. “Learning from them the value of detail in vocal music – intonation, vibrato, diction, breathing – was an important process. Since then, I’ve written a few hundred vocal pieces, and I’m working on my seventh and eighth books of madrigals. Still, I continue to listen closely to what performers tell me about their craft, to both address practical considerations and come up with productive challenges. It’s a joy to work with Donald Nally and The Crossing, which is one of the finest North American choirs, to my mind.”
The congruent mix of voices with wind instruments in The Fifth Century yields a haunting effect, human breath driving the musicality of each. About this, Bryars says: “I’ve always liked the saxophone quartet as a vehicle, and I wrote for it initially as a kind of surrogate string quartet in Alaric I or II, recorded on my ECM album After the Requiem, from 1991. And in my first opera, Medea, I replaced the oboes in the orchestra with saxophones. With my background in improvised music, I’ve always loved jazz saxophone players, from John Coltrane to Lee Konitz to Evan Parker. Percy Grainger’s transcriptions of early music for saxophones were also an inspiration – such pieces can sound beautiful on the saxophone, which is a relatively modern invention that can evoke much older sounds. With limited vibrato, a choir of saxophones and a choir of voices share a strange sort of purity, as well as that quality of human breath.”
As for the text of The Fifth Century, Bryars describes Traherne’s Metaphysical writings – a rediscovery of the late 20th century – as having “an intense spirituality, celebrating the glory of creation and an almost conversational relationship with his God. In many ways, Traherne’s work is astonishingly modern.” Brian Morton, author of this album’s liner notes, points out that T.S. Eliot believed that the power of the Metaphysical writers was that they experienced thought with the intensity of physical sensation, acknowledging “no gap between the sensuous and the intellectual.” That feeling – the sensuous and the intellectual synergistically in sync – comes out in the music of The Fifth Element as a kind of radiance, a warm glow. Bryars says: “My natural instinct is more toward the elegiac and melancholic, such as that Elizabethan regret in Dowland and Taverner. And a lot of religious writing can be dark, even doom-laden. But Traherne writes about ideas of time, eternity and omnipresence with a smile on his face, a kind of optimism. It felt absolutely fresh and inspiring to me.”
The mysterious kind of music within words speaks to Bryars, who has always been drawn to Petrarch’s sonnets for “the heartrending beauty of the poetry and their sheer technical brilliance,” he says. “As a composer, I live by commissions and these can take me in many different directions. But in an ideal world, where I could be free to write whatever I like, I would choose to write vocal music, especially settings of Petrarch.” With Two Love Songs, Bryars returns to the Italian humanist poet so beloved of Renaissance madrigalists, as well as to the sound of unaccompanied female voices. Prior to those of The Crossing, Bryars worked closely with Trio Mediaeval, the Scandinavian group having included pieces by him on their ECM New Series album Soir, Dit-Elle, from 2004. “There can be something very touching about the ethereal sound of high women’s voices,” Bryars says. “The spatial effect can be very beautiful. With the bass note way up there, the music lives on a higher plane.”
The sense of contemplative movement in Two Love Songs and The Fifth Century is characteristic of Bryars’ music and the way he thinks. “I do enjoy experiencing time in a way that is structured but not hectic or hyperactive,” he explains. “In choral music, I like to slow down the harmonic movement, not that it’s static but so that it’s gradually evolutionary. I like the effect of suddenly finding yourself in new harmonic territory without quite realizing how you got there. Most people think time is strictly objective, but it’s also subjective, a matter of perception. There’s a Zen-like idea that I appreciate: that time is going on forever, that time will go on whether you’re part of it or not. The challenge is to keep the focus concentrated. When that works, you can perceive a kind of eternity, one of infinite space.”
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The Crossing & Donald Nally – Carols After a Plague (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:23:50 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © New Focus Recordings
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.
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The Crossing – Sila: The Breath of the World (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:05 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Cantaloupe Music
Throughout the history of classical music, nature has been portrayed countless times. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Debussy’s La Mer, and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons are three obvious examples. The work of American composer John Luther Adams is inspired by the natural world, particularly Alaska, where he lived for many years. But some of his pieces aren’t simply musical portrayals of natural phenomena: they come off as being of, rather than about, nature.
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Donald Nally, PRISM Quartet & The Crossing – Gavin Bryars: The Fifth Century (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 50:11 minutes | 778 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM New Series
“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.
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The Crossing & Donald Nally – Born (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:48 minutes | 1001 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona
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.
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