Grammy Award-winning chamber choir The Crossing brings to life the striking works of six contemporary composers in this Navona Records release, with performances that are unique and awe-inspiring. The Crossing is a 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 over seventy commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues.

Over the course of the last 15 years, David Lang and The Crossing, the Grammy-winning chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally, have crafted a body of work that stands apart from the rest for it's profound spiritual connection to our shared sense of humanity-through our stories, our myths, our beliefs, and our dreams. The sense of senses is a milestone that celebrates this connection, across time and space, to deliver a message that music can be a benevolent force for change if we only take the time to listen. "This album is a collection of works that capture the intimate side of The Crossing's relationship with David Lang," Nally explains. "Only two were written for us, yet the others reflect a shared world view, a common idea about sound and community, and a collective focus on our reason for singing. David's thoroughly considered thoughts on 'why we do this' have influenced The Crossing's perpetually reexamined thoughts on that question: how to communicate deep feelings, absent of ego."

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.

A 2020 GRAMMY nominee for Best Choral Performance!

GRAMMY-winning chamber choir The Crossing is back with their latest installment in a multi-album series with Navona Records. In this latest offering, artistic director Donald Nally leads the choir through six striking pieces by composer James Primosch that confront the most elemental questions of Western philosophy. CARTHAGE opens with Journey, a solemn meditation in which the men of The Crossing chant text based on the work of 13th-century monk and mystic Meister Eckhart: “There is a journey you must take./It is a journey without destination./There is no map./Your soul will lead you./And you can take nothing with you.” Next comes the title track, Carthage, on prose by Marilynne Robinson from her novel Housekeeping, which employs the devastated city of Carthage as a metaphor for desire and imagination: “For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it.” Composer James Primosch evokes images of once-fertile fields now salted and wasted, with Nally teasing out the dynamic subtleties of a work that is nevertheless full of hope and rebirth. Following is Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus. Here, four soloists sing the Latin Mass texts, while the main choir sings Denise Levertov’s cycle of poems which gives the work its title. In pulling together these texts, Primosch celebrates the feast of St. Thomas Didymus, plumbing the depths between unbelief and faith in which true spirituality so often resides. The ancient texts are strangely illuminated by the highs and lows of Levertov’s journey. The album closes with One with the Darkness, One with the Light, a setting of poetry by Wendell Berry. True to its title, the music employs cascading harmonic textures to explore the tension between light and dark, waking and sleeping, life and death.

The Grammy-winning professional chamber choir The Crossing, Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, and Navona Records present WORDS ADORNED. Conducted by Donald Nally, with Takht musical direction by Hanna Khoury, the combined forces interpret lush scores from Kinan Abou-afach and Kareem Roustom; the music is at times driven and passionate, at others mystical and lyrical, responding to ancient Andalusian poetry in the Muwashshah tradition. The takht – masterfully handling the oud, qanun, violin, cello, and percussion – guides the kaleidoscopic sounds and colors in these poems of love, revelry, and war, with additional solo work by the virtuosic singer Dalal Abu Amneh. True to their commitment to honor tradition while constantly blazing new ground, The Crossing’s latest offering is steeped in history, deeply relevant to modern listeners, and bridges cultures seamlessly.

Lansing McLoskey’s Zealot Canticles is based on Wole Soyinka’s Twelve Canticles for the Zealot (2002)- a strangely beautiful and terrifying look into the minds of fanatics. Seven of these poems form the bulk of the libretto, interwoven with excerpts from Soyinka’s plays, interviews, lectures and speeches; they reflect his upbringing in an environment of tolerance and condemn the current climate of intolerance, bigotry, and violence. The result is a concert-length choral ‘oratorio’ for clarinet, string quartet, and 24-voice choir, commissioned and performed by The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally and winner of the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance. Soyinka’s texts and McLoskey’s responses are universal pleas for peace and tolerance, yet they force us to look into the mirror and recognize the thin line between devotion and intolerance, zealotry and radicalism- themes that dominate our public discourse every day. Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian poet, playwright, novelist, and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African American recipient of the award. Throughout the set of canticles, Soyinka makes universal pleas for peace from multiple languages and religious cultures. Seven of these poems form the core of the libretto of Zealot Canticles. Interwoven with these poems are excerpts from Soyinka’s book The Man Died, his play Madmen and Specialists, and interviews, lectures, and speeches reflecting on his upbringing in an environment of tolerance, and condemning the current climate of intolerance, bigotry and violence.

The Crossing has partnered with composer Kile Smith on several uniquely idiomatic works, spanning nearly a decade. But Navona Records’ THE ARC IN THE SKY, Smith’s 2018 setting of journal entries and poems of Robert Lax, is epic - an hour-long tour de force of thought and feeling that traverses topics ranging from Louis Armstrong to Jack Kerouac, and from Jerusalem to the shores of the island of Patmos. The enigmatic Robert Lax presents a fascinating aggregate of paradoxes: friend to Thomas Merton and the Beat poets; urbane yet reclusive; at times whimsical, at others blissful. Smith’s music for unaccompanied choir meets these words fearlessly, building great waves of majestic sound next to fragile threads of contemplation, with a broad spectrum of musical and poetic influences based on Lax’s varied interests and life experiences. The work begins with the ecstasy of Jazz – to Lax, a metaphor for life – born of his early days in New York City; the extraordinary close to the third movement is like a revival meeting. The middle section, Praise, subtly calibrates between the panoramic temple and the little things. The final section, Arc, reflects the culminations of Lax’s personal and poetic voyage: a mixture of calm observation and awe, captured by Smith in simple, overlapping canons and broad, double-choir brush strokes of sound with rich harmonies building to an unparalleled climax. THE ARC IN THE SKY is a formidable example of the heights which artistic expression can reach when its individual elements – that is, creative spirits from multiple spheres – work together in harmony. It is a pleasure to behold, and, as sung by two-time Grammy-winning choir The Crossing, an even greater pleasure to listen to.

A new recording of world premieres addressing a topic of our national discourse: diaspora. If There Were Water, from Philadelphia’s 2017 Grammy-nominated choir, The Crossing, is a testament to the expressive range of the human voice. These two strikingly diverse, yet equally compelling unaccompanied compositions were commissioned for The Crossing’s Month of Moderns festival and premiered in June 2017. Drawing from literary and historic sources, the works are highly personal reflections that speak with clarity to contemporary concerns of displacement, while weaving together past and present. In Crossings Cycle, Greek composer Stratis Minakakis creates a visceral musical response to the experience of observing Syrian refugees on the Isle of Lesbos. ‘un/bodying/s’ by composer Gregory W. Brown explores the history of the displaced populations of Quabbin, the Swift River Valley in Western Massachusetts, including the Native Americans moved by incoming Europeans, and then those Europeans relocated by the State when creating the massive reservoir that supplies Boston with water. Gregory and librettist Todd Hearon tell these stories from a variety of perspectives. The Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. Consistently recognized in critical reviews, the ensemble regularly collaborates with some of the nation’s most accomplished ensembles and imaginative composers. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir, most often addressing social issues. The group is the American Composers’ Forums’ 2017 Champion of New Music.

Philadelphia based contemporary music choir The Crossing releases "Carols after a Plague" in album format, a collection of works by twelve composers that responds to our collective experience of the last few years navigating the pandemic, as well as grappling with the fraught issues of our time. In characteristic fashion, The Crossing, led by artistic director Donald Nally, finds ways to create projects that connect music to our shared experience, with the beauty of human voices providing the glue for this timeless communal experience.

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.

Like his Pulitzer-winning work the little match girl passion, David Lang's 'poor hymnal' tries to get to the core of what a religious experience can be. "What I love about hymnals," the composer writes in his liner notes to the CD, "is that they're a catalog of things a community of worshippers can agree on - a catalog that can be sung. And what the worshippers are singing about matters." 'poor hymnal' is a concert-length work written for the multiple GRAMMY Award-winning chamber choir The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally. Lang constructed the text by stitching together lines, phrases and poignant utterances from sources as varied as the Old Testament, Mahatma Gandhi and Tolstoy - to name just a few. As Lang explains: "This piece is trying to say: The reason we are coming together is to remember how important we are to each other, and to remember how important it is that we take care of each other."

Acclaimed by the New York Times as "an alluring, mystical new work" when it premiered outdoors at the city's Lincoln Center in July 2014, John Luther Adams' Sila: the Breath of the World is so carefully orchestrated that the recording itself pushes the limits of how to capture multiple ensembles of musicians in one setting. Thanks to modern technology and the magic of multi-tracking (with producers Doug Perkins and Nathaniel Reichman at the controls), Sila maintains the composer's vision as a grand invitation to the listener "to stop and listen more deeply." Put simply, like Inuksuit (2009), widely known as Adams' large ensemble piece for percussion, no two performances of Sila are ever the same, due in part to the freedom that is given to the musicians, each of whom plays or sings a unique part at his or her own pace. But on a macro level, Sila can also be described as an intelligent entity all its own — a living, breathing organism that takes on the collective intent of its performers, and its composer, to transcend the forces of nature and become, in a sense, a "breath of the world."