The Crossing Releases New Film, The Forest, and Announces Sixth Consecutive GRAMMY Nomination

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PR Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts and Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214

The Crossing Releases New Film, The Forest 

A Socially Distanced In-Person Performance Experience
Filmed Live at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve in October 2020

Take a walk through The Forest.

“Something that couldn’t have been imagined in other time and is fully 
realized on a high level.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Plus, The Crossing Nominated for Sixth GRAMMY Award 
in Five Consecutive Years for CARTHAGE

Six Striking Works by James Primosch, Released May 2020 on Navona Records
www.navonarecords.com/epk/carthage 

www.crossingchoir.org 
 

Philadelphia, PA (November 24, 2020) — The Crossing announces the release of a new film, The Forest, shot live at the ensemble’s October 2020 socially distant, sold-out performances of the same name. In a time when choirs cannot sing and perform together in conventional ways, The Forest featured the 24 singers of The Crossing performing along a trail at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve in New Hope, Pennsylvania, situated in the sounds and sights of the woods, while audience members walked, through the soundscape and landscape. The film was created by the Philadelphia-based Four/Ten Media and Crossing in-house sound designer Paul Vazquez, using binaural (360º) audio capture and a single, continuous take in which the camera lens becomes the eye of the audience, moving leisurely through the work.

The release, two days prior to Thanksgiving Day in the United States, is offered as a gesture of community and of gratitude to the community of The Crossing and the many who will spend the holiday separated from friends and family. Take a walk through The Forest.

Of The Forest, The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “The only problem is that I didn’t want to leave but had to because other listeners — who entered the piece at socially distanced intervals — were trailing behind...Though only 25 minutes long, The Forest truly felt like a journey, and one in which the many layers of expression mirrored the multi-ring-circus thought process that goes on in my head.”

The Forest focuses on the symbiotic relationship between individual trees and the forest – a metaphor for the relationship between each singer and the ensemble. The libretto is formed from The Crossing singers’ reflections on their isolation during COVID-Time, overlaid with texts from Scott Russell Sanders’ essay Mind in the Forest. The music was composed by Donald Nally and Kevin Vondrak, respectively, conductor and assistant conductor of The Crossing. The Forest experience was available by reservation only, entering at timed intervals in family pods (1-4 people), with two-minute buffers between each group. Pods walked along a prescribed trail, in a loop that did not require them to double back across other audience members or singers. 

The Forest saw the premiere of The Crossing’s new amplification system, Echoes, developed by sound designer Paul Vazquez, to present newly-commissioned works in accordance with social distancing guidelines. Echoes allowed the singers to stand and safely sing 30 feet from each other and from the audience while listeners walked along a well-worn, mostly flat path of approximately .3 mile lined with speakers. Though the work captures the isolation of singers during the pandemic, Echoes paradoxically allowed the experience to be intimate and personal. The 25-minute, intimate experience reestablishes those currently-broken relationships between singers and audience members, and tells The Crossing’s story – a story of a planet in crisis, its people and its forests in peril, and yet, in that curiously human way, a story of hope and a way forward.  

The Recording Academy announced today that The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, has received its sixth GRAMMY Award nomination in five consecutive years for CARTHAGE (Navona, May 2020), an album featuring six striking pieces by composer James Primosch. 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. CARTHAGE offers an astounding range of composing prowess, from intimate works in just two parts, to virtuosic, extended anthems of great power. Listen to CARTHAGE: www.navonarecords.com/epk/carthage 

The Crossing won the 2018 GRAMMY for Best Choral Performance for Gavin Bryars’ The Fifth Century (ECM, October 2016), their collaboration with PRISM Quartet, and the 2019 GRAMMY for Best Choral Performance for Lansing McLoskey’s Zealot Canticles. The Crossing’s recordings of Thomas Lloyd’s Bonhoeffer (Albany 2016), Robert Convery and Benjamin Boyle’s Voyages (August 2019, Innova), and Kile Smith’s The Arc in the Sky (July 2019, Navona) were also nominated for GRAMMY Awards.

Donald Nally says, “We did not expect that Thanksgiving 2020 would bring much beyond magnifying our isolation. Yet, the film of The Forest comes as an inspiring example of what we can all do together, even with our masks and our distance. Kevin and I are so humbled by the singers’ performance in this piece and the team’s commitment and artistry in bringing it to life and then to film. Add to this film release today’s news of our fifth consecutive year of Grammy nominations for Best Choral Performance, and we are reminded that there is much to be thankful for. We love singing Jim Primosch’s music and we love walking arm in arm with him into our own historical landmark; six nominations for commissioned new music expanding the choral canon. Joyful.”

About The Crossing
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 110 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues.

The Crossing collaborates with some of the world’s most accomplished ensembles and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Beth Morrison Projects, Allora & Calzadilla, Bang on a Can, Klockriketeatern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of world’s most prestigious venues and presenters, such as the Park Avenue Armory, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, National Sawdust, 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, 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, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space in New York, Winter Garden with WNYC, and Duke, Northwestern, Colgate, and Notre Dame Universities. The Crossing holds an annual residency at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana where they are working on an extensive, multi-year project with composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison. 

With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 21 releases, receiving two Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and six Grammy nominations. The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forum’s 2017 Champion of New Music. They were 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.

Recently, The Crossing has expanded its choral presentation to film, working with Four/Ten Media, in-house sound designer Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services, visual artists Brett Snodgrass and Steven Bradshaw, and composers David Lang and Michael Gordon on live and animated versions of new and existing works. Lang’s protect yourself from infection and in nature were specifically designed to be performed within the restrictions imposed by the Covid 19 pandemic.

The Crossing is represented by Alliance Artist Management. All of its concerts are broadcast on WRTI, Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz public radio station. Learn more at www.crossingchoir.org.  

*Photo by John C. Hawthorne

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