The Crossing Opens 2022-23 Season with Walking the Farm: A Progressive Concert

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Leah Rankin | Morahan Arts and Media
leah@morahanartsandmedia.com | 646-378-9386

THE CROSSING OPENS 2022-23 SEASON WITH
WALKING THE FARM: A PROGRESSIVE CONCERT
AT KINGS OAKS FARM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 &
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18

Choir and Audience Visit Sites Throughout the Farm to a
Hear World Premiere of New Work by George Lewis, Plus Works by
Kirsten Broberg, Jonathan Dove, David Shapiro, and Pe¯teris Vasks,
While Sampling Local Bites, Beer & Wine

www.crossingchoir.org

Philadelphia, PA (August 16, 2022) — Grammy Award-winning choir The Crossing opens its 2022-23 season with Walking the Farm: A Progressive Concert hosted by Art at Kings Oaks at Kings Oaks Farm in Bucks County, PA on Saturday, September 17, 2022 at 4:00pm and Sunday, September 18, 2022 at 4:00pm. The interactive experience invites audience members to join The Crossing as the choir presents the world premiere of a new work by George Lewis, along with previous commissions Breathturn by Kirsten Broberg, It is time by David Shapiro and related works: In beauty may I walk by Jonathan Dove, and a thoughtful setting of a Czeslaw Milosz poem, Encounter “We were riding through frozen fields” by Latvian composer Pe¯teris Vasks. Each work is performed at its own post, a musical resting place, along the short trek as the concert weaves throughout Kings Oaks Farm.

Inspired by the land and our relationship to it, the program explores human observation of nature and farmland, and serves as the opening bookend to the season, which closes in June with Farming, a new concert-length work of Ted Hearne considering themes of history and culture; land use, possession, and repossession; food, its source, and the unnamed people who grow it and move it, using the oft misunderstood phrase "farm to table."

Walking the Farm is based on the “progressive dinner” model. Audience members will stroll the farm to hear brief sung performances at five sites—the barn, the creek, the old chapel, the field, the garden—while sampling local beer, wine, and small bites at each.

The Crossing has presented several memorable outdoor concert experiences including The Forest (2020). Described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as a performance that “truly felt like a journey,” The Forest was The Crossing’s response to the limitations on group singing during the pandemic in which audience members walked through a socially distanced soundscape and landscape in Penn's Woods at Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Most recently in 2021, The Crossing presented its annual Month of Moderns festival at outdoor locations throughout Philadelphia that allowed for intimate, yet spatially distanced performances.

Walking the Farm: A Progressive Concert is hosted by Art at Kings Oaks, which presents its eighth annual exhibition reimagining the historic barn and chapel as unique settings for local, national, and international art to inhabit. Curated by Bucks County painter Alex Cohen and theatre artist Clara Weishahn, the exhibition will preview during The Crossing’s Walking the Farm: A Progressive Concert, and is open to the public the two following weeks from September 23 to October 9. For more information, visit www.kingsoaksart.com 

Performance Details
Walking the Farm: A Progressive Concert
The Crossing
Saturday, September 17, 2022 at 4:00pm
Sunday, September 18, 2022 at 4:00pm
Kings Oaks Farm | 756 Worthington Mill Road | Newtown, PA
Tickets: $20-$35
Ticket Link: https://thecrossing.ticketleap.com/walking-the-farm/

Please note: there will be no walk-up tickets available at the concert. All tickets must be purchased in advance. Casual clothes are recommended. Please contact shannon@crossingchoir.org for special circumstances requiring onsite shuttling.

Program:
Jonathan Dove - In beauty may I walk
Pe¯teris Vasks - Encounter “We were riding through frozen fields”
Kristin Broberg - Breathturn
David Shapiro - It is time
George Lewis - [World Premiere]

This concert is sponsored by Manoff Market Gardens and Cidery and Mad Princes Brewing Company.

About The Crossing
The Crossing is a Grammy Award-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 140 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. 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.

With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 24 releases, receiving two GRAMMY® Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and seven 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, Michael Gordon, and Paul Fowler on live and animated versions of new and existing works. Lang’s protect yourself from infection and in nature as well as Paul Fowler’s Obligations, based on a poem of Layli Long Soldier, were specifically created to be within the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Crossing’s pandemic response daily series, Rising w/ The Crossing, a series of 72 live performances with notes by Nally, has been archived by the Library of Congress as “an important part of the collection and the historical record.”

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.

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