May 22: The Crossing Releases CARTHAGE, Featuring Six Works by James Primosch, on Navona Records

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

The Crossing Releases
CARTHAGE

Six Striking Works from James Primosch,
Winner of the 2020 Virgil Thomson Award 

Out Friday, May 22, 2020 on Navona Records 
Physical Copies & Downloads Available Upon Request

“America’s most astonishing choir”
– The New York Times

www.crossingchoir.org 

New York, NY (April 7, 2020) — On Friday, May 22, 2020, GRAMMY-winning choir The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, releases CARTHAGE, an album featuring six striking pieces by composer James Primosch, on Navona Records. 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. The album 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.” 

The title track, Carthage, draws on prose from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, a work that 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.” In the piece, Primosch evokes images of once-fertile fields now salted and wasted, but nevertheless full of hope and rebirth.

Following is Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus, in which 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 – better known as “doubting Thomas” – plumbing the depths between unbelief and faith in which true spirituality so often resides. 

More works inspired by questions of spirit and faith round out the program, with spiralling ecstatically – a setting of a poem of E.E. Cummings – and Two Arms of the Harbor, drawing on the musings of Thomas Merton. 

Closing the unique collection of Primosch’s choral music is 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. 

About James Primosch
The 2020 winner of The Virgil Thomson Award for Vocal Music from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, James Primosch’s compositional voice encompasses a broad range of expressive types. The New Yorker stated that Primosch “scores with a sure, light hand” and critics for The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Dallas Morning News have characterized his music as “impressive,” “striking,” “grandly romantic,” “stunning,” and “very approachable”.

His music can be intensely lyrical, as in the song cycle Holy the Firm (composed for Dawn Upshaw) or dazzlingly angular as in Secret Geometry for piano and electronic sound. His affection for jazz is reflected in works like the Piano Quintet, while his work as a church musician informs the many pieces in his catalog based on sacred songs or religious texts.

Primosch’s instrumental, vocal, and electronic works have been performed throughout the United States and in Europe by such ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Collage, the New York New Music Ensemble, and the Twentieth Century Consort. His Icons was played at the ISCM/League of Composers World Music Days in Hong Kong, and Dawn Upshaw included a song by Primosch in her Carnegie Hall recital debut. Commissioned works by Primosch have been premiered by the Chicago Symphony, the Albany Symphony, Speculum Musicae, the Cantata Singers, and pianist Lambert Orkis. A second Chicago Symphony commission was premiered in October, 2009. He is presently at work on a song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble on texts by former MacArthur fellow Susan Stewart.

Among the honors he has received are a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three prizes from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, a Regional Artists Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Stoeger Prize of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and a fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Center where he studied with John Harbison. Organizations commissioning Primosch include the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Folger Consort, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Barlow Endowment, and the Network for New Music. In 1994 he served as composer-in-residence at the Marlboro Music Festival. Recordings of eighteen compositions by Primosch have appeared on the Albany, Azica, Bard, Bridge, CRI, Centaur, Innova, and New World labels, with new discs of vocal and choral works planned.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1956, James Primosch studied at Cleveland State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University. He counts Mario Davidovsky, George Crumb, and Richard Wernick among his principal teachers.

James Primosch is also active as a pianist, particularly in the realm of contemporary music. He was a prizewinner at the Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition in Rotterdam, and appears on recordings for New World, CRI, the Smithsonian Collection, and Crystal Records. He has worked as a jazz pianist and a liturgical musician.

Since 1988 he has served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Presser Electronic Music Studio. Learn more at www.jamesprimosch.com.

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 90 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues. With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 19 releases, receiving two GRAMMY Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and five GRAMMY nominations in three years.

The Crossing collaborates with some of the world’s most accomplished ensembles and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Tempesta di Mare Baroque Chamber Orchestra, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Toshimaru Nakamura, the Annenberg Center, Beth Morrison Projects, Dolce Suono, Allora & Calzadilla, Pig Iron Theatre Company, The Rolling Stones, and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), with whom they have appeared at Miller Theatre of Columbia University in the American premiere of James Dillon’s Nine Rivers, Peak Performances at Montclair State University, The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. The Crossing joined Bang on a Can for its first Philadelphia Marathon. Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of the world’s most prestigious venues and presenters, such as the Park Avenue Armory, the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, National Sawdust, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Haarlem Choral Bienalle in The Netherlands, The Kennedy Center in Washington, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Delaware Museum of Art, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space in New York, the WNYC Winter Garden, and Duke, Northwestern, Rowan, Salisbury, Colgate, and Notre Dame Universities. In 2014, they premiered John Luther Adams’ Sila: the breath of the world at Lincoln Center with Jack Quartet and eighth blackbird. 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. Their concerts are broadcast regularly on WRTI 90.1FM, Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz Public Radio. In the 2019-2020 season The Crossing will return to Carnegie Hall and make debuts at The Met Cloisters in New York, and the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki.

The Crossing has presented nearly 90 commissioned world premieres. Major new works have include Michael Gordon’s Anonymous Man (2017), Michael Gilbertson’s Born (2017), Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ad genua (2016), Lansing McLoskey’s Zealot Canticles (2017), Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands (2016), John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Holy Wind (2013, co-commissioned with Kamer), Gavin Bryars’ The Fifth Century (2014, written for The Crossing and PRISM), Stratis Minakakis’ Crossings Cycle (2015/2017), Gregory Spears’ The Tower and the Garden (2019), Gregory Brown’s un/bodying/s (2017), David Lang’s statement to the court (2010), Lewis Spratlan’s Hesperus is Phosphorus (2012, co-commissioned with Network for New Music), from Ted Hearne’s Sound From the Bench (2014, co-commissioned with Volti) and Animals (2018, co-commissioned with the Park Avenue Armory), and, from Kile Smith, The Arc in the Sky (2018), The Consolation of Apollo (2014), The Waking Sun (2011), Vespers (2008, a commission of Piffaro), and The Arc in the Sky (2018). In 2019, the women of The Crossing collaborated with The New York Philharmonic on the world premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth. In 2016, The Crossing presented Seven Responses with new works including those of David T. Little, Hans Thomalla, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, and Santa Ratniece. That same year, The Crossing commissioned and presented Jeff Quartets, a rare compilation of quartets from fifteen of the world’s leading composers, presented as a concert-length set and collected in an omnibus edition. In June 2019, The Crossing presented its largest project to date, Aniara: fragments of time and space, a collaboration with Klockriketeatern in Helsinki, and composer Robert Maggio. Future projects include composers Edie Hill, Tawnie Olson, Daniel Felsenfeld, Tawnie Olson, Harold Meltzer, Stacy Garrop, Jacob Cooper, David Shapiro, Aaron Helgeson, Martin Bresnick, Caroline Shaw, Gabriel Kahane, and Marcos Balter.

The Crossing’s recordings of Robert Convery and Benjamin Boyle’s Voyages (August 2019, Innova) and Kile Smith’s The Arc in the Sky (July 2019, Navona) were both nominated for 2020 GRAMMY Awards for Best Choral Performance. Lansing McLoskey's Zealot Canticles won the 2019 GRAMMY and Thomas Lloyd’s Bonhoeffer (Albany 2016) was nominated for the 2017 GRAMMY, both as Best Choral Performance. The Crossing’s collaboration with PRISM, Gavin Bryars’ The Fifth Century (ECM, October 2016), was the winner of the 2018 GRAMMY Award for Best Choral Performance and named one of The Chicago Tribune’s Top 10 Classical CDs of the 2016.

The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forums’ 2017 Champion of New Music. The Crossing’s 2014 commission Sound from The Bench by Ted Hearne was named a 2018 Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. They were the recipient of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, as well as the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award (with composer Joel Puckett) from Chorus America. Learn more at www.crossingchoir.org 

About PARMA Recordings
Navona Records is a PARMA Recordings Company. PARMA Recordings is a leading figure in the commercial production and curated promotion of sounds by today’s musicians. Since 2008, PARMA’s GRAMMY-winning team has produced over 900 commercial releases, with works ranging from Billboard-topping classical chamber music to Cuban jazz to experimental electronic works. Music from our distributed labels has been featured in settings and situations from CBS to Carnegie Hall, Microsoft to the Musikverein, and Nintendo to National Geographic, and the 2019 Navona Records release THE ARC IN THE SKY was nominated for a 2020 GRAMMY Award.

CARTHAGE Track List
1. James Primosch – Journey
2. James Primosch – Carthage
3. – 7. James Primosch – Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus
     I. Kyrie
     II. Gloria
     III. Credo
     IV. Sanctus
     V. Agnus Dei
8. James Primosch – spiralling ecstatically
9. James Primosch – Two Arms of the Harbor
10. James Primosch – One with the Darkness, One with the Light

The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor

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