The Crossing Announces 2022-2023 Season 'Cultivate / Curate'

Grammy-winning new-music choir The Crossing, led by conductor Donald Nally, today announces its 2022-2023 season Cultivate/Curate, which features world premieres by Julia Wolfe, Caroline Shaw, Jennifer Higdon, Michael Gordon, John Luther Adams, George Lewis, Ted Hearne, and Martin Bresnick.

Collaborators include The New York Philharmonic with Jaap van Zweden, The Philadelphia Orchestra with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, cellist Maya Beiser, the PRISM Quartet, and organist Scott Dettra.

"The Crossing has commissioned a number of works addressing our relationship to the earth, our care and absence of care in curating and managing responsibilities that have fallen to us as the planet's most innovative and deadly species," said The Crossing conductor Donald Nally. "This season brings those themes together in a joyful, thoughtful, and explorative way, through two concerts in the open fields of a Bucks County farm and new works from Ted Hearne, Caroline Shaw, George Lewis, Jennifer Higdon, John Luther Adams, and Julia Wolfe - all focused on the earth, its creatures, and its health."

The Crossing has named Ayanna Woods as its first ever Resident Composer for the 2022-23 season. In addition to composing, Ayanna is bandleader of her group Yadda Yadda; sought-after as a touring bassist in the bands TASHA, Manual Cinema, and Ben LaMar Gay; and is a Grammy-nominated singer in Ted Hearne's PLACE (Pulitzer finalist in 2021). She was commissioned by The Crossing in September 2020, and her work SHIFT grew into a three-movement piece that has been part of The Crossing's repertoire and performed frequently ever since. As Resident Composer, Ayanna will be part of the development of the premieres of other composers this season, and will compose a new, substantial choral work for The Crossing, premiering in the 2023-2024 Season. Additionally, The Crossing has initiated a new partnership with the Pennsylvania Girlchoir, and Ayanna will work with the choristers to develop musical material, which she will then turn into a new composition to be premiered by the Pennsylvania Girlchoir in the 2023-24 season.

The 2022-2023 season opens with Walking the Farm; a Progressive Concert on September 17 and 18, 2022 at 4pm at King Oaks Farm (near Newtown) in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Based on the "progressive dinner" model, this concert takes audience members to five stations around the bucolic farm: the barn, the creek, the old chapel, the field, and the garden. At each, participants commune, sharing locally-sourced bites, local beers and wines, plus listen to a choral work inspired by the land and our relationship to it. A new work by George Lewis is joined by previous commissions by Kirsten Broberg and David Shapiro, in addition to a thoughtful setting of a Czeslaw Milosz poem by Latvian P?"teris Vasks.

The Crossing collaborates with cellist Maya Beiser for Michael Gordon's Travel Guide to Nicaragua on November 16, 2022 at 7pm at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia) and on November 17, 2022 at 7:30pm at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall (New York premiere, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall). This second of a series of autobiographical works (following on his Anonymous Man, also written for The Crossing) visits scenes of Michael's childhood in a family of European Jewish refugees in Central America. The work gives a look at the intersection of memory and emotion, presented with candor, melancholy, and humor, as well as Michael's uniquely personal, innovative style. This November 16th concert is also included as part of Penn Live Arts digital season.

The Crossing's annual holiday fare, The Crossing @ Christmas, this year includes works by Caroline Shaw and Mason Bates with two performances on December 16, 2022 at 7pm at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square and on December 18, 2022 at 5pm at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, both in Philadelphia with organist Scott Dettra. The Crossing is featured in a world premiere by Caroline Shaw, inspired by the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kem Luther, focused on the self-cultivating friend to the earth's surface, moss. Mason Bates' Mass Transmission, for organ and electronics, explores how the advent of radio technology brought humanity closer yet magnified distances and loneliness, drawing on radio-wave communications in the 1920s between parents in the Netherlands and their children on Java, sent there to work for the Dutch government. Caroline Shaw's world premiere was commissioned by Cantori New York, The Crossing, Notre Dame Vocale, and Volti with funding provided by the Ann Stookey Fund for New Music.

A world premiere from Philadelphia-based composer Jennifer Higdon lies at the center of The Crossing's concert for the national conference of the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) on February 24, 2023 at 8pm at the Aronoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio. Jennifer Higdon's world premiere was commissioned by ACDA for The Crossing. The program also features Ayanna Woods' defiant and uplifting SHIFT, reimagining national monuments; Edie Hill's Spectral Spirits, remembering extinct birds; and Shara Nova's Resolve, inviting audiences to embrace discomfort and live humbly under the sun, in addition to Caroline Shaw's new work presented on The Crossing's December concerts, now performed for an even more expansive audience. The program is reprised on tour on February 26, 2023 at 4pm at the University of Chicago's Friedman Hall and on February 28, 2023 at 8:15pm at Ithaca College's Ford Hall.

On Friday, March 24, 2023 at 7pm at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia), The Crossing reunites with the saxophone quartet PRISM (with whom they won their first Grammy) for the world premiere of Martin Bresnick's Self-Portraits, Unfinished, commissioned by The Crossing and PRISM. Martin's piece features the philosophical observations of Melville, Joyce, Hardy, and Hopkins that come together in Bresnick's Cento (a new poem, constructed of previously-existing poems), creating a tumultuous journey of questioning, whimsy, and stoicism.

The great sonic landscapes that have made John Luther Adams' depictions of the oceans and deserts wildly popular, emerge anew with great transparency in the world premiere Vespers of the Blessed Earth, a meditation on the curation of the planet, written for The Crossing and The Philadelphia Orchestra, and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with performances on March 30, 2023 at 7:30pm, April 1, 2023 at 8pm and April 2, 2023 at 2pm at Verizon Hall at The Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, and on March 31, 2023 at 8pm at Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall in New York. The new work is commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra.

On June 1, 2023 at 7:30pm, June 2 at 8pm and June 3 at 8pm at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, the men of The Crossing collaborate with the New York Philharmonic for the world premiere of Julia Wolfe's new work, unEarth, which addresses humans' impact on this little planet. unEarth is a reunion of the creative collaborators behind Fire in my Mouth (Grammy-nominated recording from the New York Philharmonic's 2018-19 concert season) with Anne Kauffman directing, together with projections, amplified sound, and led by Jaap van Zweden. unEarth is commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the New York Philharmonic and The Crossing.

The Crossing returns to King Oaks Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on June 22, 23, 24, and 25, 2023 at 7:30pm for the world premiere of Farming, Ted Hearne's follow-up work to Sound from the Bench (2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist, commissioned by The Crossing) which draws on his model of appropriating governmental, military and legal texts, commissioned by The Crossing. The new work grapples with the current impact of agricultural history on identities and ideologies, and asks what it would take to reconnect with the people who produce our food, and what forces are keeping us apart. Major support for Farming has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

In late July/early August 2023, The Crossing heads back to its summer home at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana. For more information, visit warrenmillerpac.org.

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