The Crossing Unveils 20th Season Featuring Performances at Lincoln Center & More

Three-time GRAMMY Award-winning professional chamber choir The Crossing, led by conductor Donald Nally and dedicated to new music, has revealed its 2024-2025 Season. Marking its 20th season performing music that addresses social, environmental, and political issues, "America's most astonishing choir" (The New York Times) reflects on hallmarks of its remarkable evolution: recordings, performances, world premieres, groundbreaking collaborations, academic residencies, and adventurous development of new works.

Conductor Donald Nally says, "This upcoming 20th season of The Crossing is a season of questions, echoing those of Immanuel Kant: What can we know? What should we do? What may I hope? "While I'm not sure we answer those questions, they are posed in remarkably thoughtful, inspiring, and even joyful works by some of the most creative composers of our time."

The season kicks off on Friday, September 6, at 8:00 p.m., with a new program of music from Ayanna Woods, David Lang, Shara Nova, and Gabriela Ortiz at Gettysburg College. The concert, titled What belongs to me, asks how we relate to the Earth, to our bodies through the lens of capitalism, to our histories and myths, to our bodies through the lens of our fears and tensions, and to each other. The composers find surprisingly optimistic angles in the corners of these questions.

What belongs to me? returns to the stage at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, on Friday, November 15 at 8:00 p.m., as the culmination of weeklong residency with Annie-B Parson and David Lang, workshopping a staged version of Lang's poor hymnal, a work to be heard throughout the rest of the season. The concert magnifies UNC's long relationship with singer-songwriter Shara Nova, whose music anchors What belongs to me?

The Crossing returns to Carnegie Hall on Friday, October 18 at 7:30 p.m. for the New York Premiere of Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness in Zankel Hall. Inspired by James Drake's epic drawing of the same title, Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness is an immersive performance that unfolds in five movements, with a score by Carnegie Hall's 2024-2025 Debs Composer's Chair Gabriela Ortiz, text and lyrics by award-winning author Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and 24 singers of The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally. The multidisciplinary collaboration also features master flutist Alejandro Escuer in a prominent role, dancers of the Alvin Ailey School choreographed by Harrison Guy, and a percussion quartet of alumni of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. The collaborative performance tells its story from the perspective of "the Earth, the Land, the Soil, the Sand," which "do not demand our daughters and our sons as sacrifices." Through a journey from violence and conflict to healing and forgiveness, this unique production, directed by Steve Jiménez, seeks to encourage hope in divisive times.

Two days before the New York Premiere, a workshop preview performance of Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness comes to Philadelphia, on Wednesday, October 16 at 7:00 p.m. at The Performance Garage.

David Lang's poor hymnal is one of those rare pieces that seamlessly and quickly moves from its first performance to icon. Premiered last December in Philadelphia, in what critic David Patrick Stearns called, "music that doesn't pull punches but leads listeners inward to the humanitarian core that's there but not always accessed," it immediately entered The Crossing's canon. This season, it returns for performances from New York to Des Moines, Lincoln to Princeton. In poor hymnal, Lang sets out to ask the question, "if a community placed the most challenged among us at the center of its practice, what would its hymnal sound like?" The result is a thoughtful, moving, inspiring work about how we treat each other, inspired by texts that range from Ghandi to Obama, Deuteronomy to Tolstoy, and Proverbs to Corinthians.

The Crossing makes its Alice Tully Hall debut at Lincoln Center with the New York premiere of poor hymnal on Saturday, December 21, at 7:30 p.m., as part of the Lincoln Center Presents series and "The Crossing @ Christmas 2024." Additional shows, presented as the Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Concerts, take place on Friday, December 20 at 7:00 p.m. at Saint Mark's Church, 1625 Locust Street in Philadelphia, and Sunday, December 22 at 5:00 p.m. at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 885 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia.

The poor hymnal tour continues in February, with performances in Princeton University's Richardson Auditorium on Tuesday, February 4 at 7:30 p.m., presented by McCarter Theatre; the University of Iowa's Voxman Music Building in Iowa City on Thursday, February 13 at 7:30 p.m., as part of a residency with David Lang; Drake University's Sheslow Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa, on Friday, February 14 at 7:30 p.m.; and First Plymouth Congregational Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Sunday, February 16 at 4:00 p.m., presented by Abendmusik.

The world premiere of Sebastian Currier's Mysterium and the North American premiere of Linda Catlin Smith's Folio form an exciting double bill for The Crossing's Philadelphia performance on Friday, February 7, at 7:00 p.m. In Mysterium, words of physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf and novelist Pia de Jong are in juxtaposition, questioning life - spans, purpose, brevity. Heralded as "music with a distinctive voice" by the New York Times and as "lyrical, colorful, firmly rooted in tradition, but absolutely new" by the Washington Post, Currier's music has been presented at major venues worldwide by acclaimed artists and orchestras. Having premiered in Ireland in 2023, Linda Catlin Smith's Folio is based on the envelope writings of Emily Dickinson, and fragments somewhere between thoughts and poetry. The concert will also feature movements of Robert Convery's masterwork, Voyages, based on the poetry cycle of Hart Crane.

Just after their tour of the Midwest, the trebles of The Crossing head to the Boston Symphony Orchestra to be featured in Gabriela Ortiz's Revolución diamantina (Glitter Revolution), a work for eight amplified voices and full orchestra. The Glitter March (August 2019) is the popular name bestowed on an incident in which protesters threw pink glitter at the Chief of Police of Mexico City to denounce the lack of response and impunity that ensued following the rape of a woman by local officers. Ortiz's work dives deeply into themes of feminism, femicide, and general equality. Performances take place on Thursday, February 27, at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, February 28 at 1:30 p.m.; and Sunday, March 1, at 8:00 p.m. at Symphony Hall in Boston.

The season continues Saturday, June 14 at 5:00 p.m. at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, as The Crossing reunites with British icon Gavin Bryars to celebrate the composer's ninth decade with a concert-length work that crowns their long history of collaborations. Bryars will set excerpts from Thomas De Quincey's entertaining, sorrowful, and often humorous essay The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, which touches on the universal topics of aging and transformation, while incorporating the transcendental idealist's thoughts on time, space, and thinking - thoughts that made him one of the most influential philosophers in history.

The final live performance of the 2024-2025 season will be the New York premiere of Aaron Helgeson's The Book of Never, a fascinating, gripping adaptation of the mysterious Novgorod Codex. The work reaches back 1000 years into Ukraine history, with the sadly contemporary story of an attempt to destroy and erase a culture. The Codex was a 10th-century monk's effort to preserve the history of his excommunicated village by writing and overwriting many layers, a technique that Aaron masters musically as he overlays these ancient texts with those of 20th-century liberal writers Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Gertrude Stein, Angela Davis, and Thanhha Lai. The single performance is at St. Peter's Church, 601 Lexington Ave, on Friday June 20 at 7:00 p.m. The concert is co-sponsored by The Arts and Architecture Conservancy at Saint Peter's.

Showtimes, venues, tickets, and more information on all 2024-2025 Season performances are available at crossingchoir.org/upcoming.

Six recordings to be released across the season

As leading recording artists in their field, The Crossing anticipates the release of five albums and an important single timed to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.

In September, Navona Records will release Ways We Went, with music by Martin Bresnick featuring PRISM Quartet (saxophones) and music by Mason Bates with Scott Dettra at the organ. October will see a sequel to the 2020 project The Crossing Votes with a release of a new work of composer and conductor Michael Gilbertson just before Election Day. Cloud Anthem is based on a poem by Richard Blanco, with animated film by LA artist Brett Snodgrass. Later in October, the ensemble continues its close relationship with Parma/Navona Records with a new compilation album, Meciendo, featuring a variety of new works from seven composers ranging from those emerging to those long-established.

Aligning with performances in Philadelphia and New York, the album of David Lang's poor hymnal is due in December. Spring 2025 will see the release of two more cutting-edge recordings: Ted Hearne's genre-breaking Farming, and At Which Point, an album of music written for The Crossing by Wang Lu, Ayanna Woods, and Tawnie Olson.

Learn more about The Crossing's recording catalogue at crossingchoir.org/listen.

About The Crossing
Musical America's 2024 Ensemble of the Year, The Crossing is a Grammy-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. Many of its nearly 190 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues. With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 34 releases, receiving three Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019, 2023), and nine Grammy nominations.

The Crossing collaborates with some of the world's most accomplished ensembles and artists, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Lyric Fest, Allora & Calzadilla, Bang on a Can, Klockriketeatern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of world's most prestigious venues and presenters, such as Carnegie Hall, Stockholm's Berwaldhallen, the Park Avenue Armory, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, The Big Sing (formerly Haarlem Choral Biennale) in The Netherlands, The Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, The Kennedy Center in Washington, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, and Notre Dame Universities.

Recent projects include performances in Stockholm, Helsinki, Houston, and Philadelphia with major new works from Tania León, Wang Lu, David T. Little, David Lang, Gabriella Ortiz, David T. Little, and Ayanna Woods. Their most recent collaborations include two with Carnegie Hall: Michael Gordon's Travel Guide to Nicaragua, commissioned for The Crossing by Carnegie Hall and Penn Live Arts and John Luther Adam's Vespers of the Blessed Earth with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Julia Wolfe has written two major works for The Crossing and The New York Philharmonic: Fire in my Mouth and unEarth. Recent touring has taken the ensemble to the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam (Shara Nova's Titration); Cincinnati, Ithaca, and the University of Chicago's Neubauer Collegium (a world premiere of Jennifer Higdon, with commissioned music of Caroline Shaw, Edie Hill, and Ayanna Woods); and Ted Hearne's Farming, which premiered outdoors on a farm in Bucks County, PA, and toured to Haarlem, The Netherlands, and Caramoor Center for Music and Arts.

The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forum's 2017 Champion of New Music. They are the recipients of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, and the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America.

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