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Press Releases
Dec. 20-22: The Crossing @ Christmas Features World Premiere of Edie Hill’s Spectral Spirits and David Lang’s the little match girl passion
The Crossing PR Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts and Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214
Annenberg Center PR Contact: Katherine Blodgett | Communications Consulting
katherineblodgett@gmail.com | 215.431.1230
The Crossing @ Christmas in Philadelphia and NYC Features
the World Premiere of Edie Hill’s Spectral Spirits Paired with David Lang’s
the little match girl passion, December 20-22
The Crossing @ Christmas presented by the Annenberg Center
Friday, December 20, 2019 at 7:30pm
Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square | Philadelphia, PA
The Crossing @ Christmas
Saturday, December 21, 2019 at 12:30pm and 3:30pm
The Met Cloisters | New York, NY
The Crossing @ Christmas
Sunday, December 22, 2019 at 5:00pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill | Philadelphia, PA
“America’s most astonishing choir.” – The New York Times
Philadelphia, PA; New York, NY (November 18, 2019) — Grammy-winning new-music choir The Crossing reprises its annual holiday program, The Crossing @ Christmas, at Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia on Friday, December 20, 2019 at 7:30pm presented by the Annenberg Center; at The Met Cloisters in New York City on Saturday, December 21, 2019 at 12:30pm and 3:30pm; and back in Philadelphia at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill on Sunday, December 22, 2019 at 5:00pm.
The program includes David Lang’s Pulitzer-winning the little match girl passion (2008), a work championed by The Crossing and one of the few works they return to repeatedly. Recasting Hans Christian Andersen’s tale in the form of a passion, based loosely on the structure and words of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, David Lang draws a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. Lang notes “that all its parts—the horror and the beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.”
The Crossing @ Christmas also features the world premiere performances of Spectral Spirits, a major commission from Edie Hill based on poems of Holly Hughes. The new 30-minute work explores the extraordinary beauty and diversity of the natural world found in birds; and it views those birds through a lens of loss and nostalgia. All of the birds in the work once numbered in millions and are now gone.
Hill says, "It’s a joy to compose for The Crossing with their one of a kind, grace, precision, vocal athleticism and sublimity of tone. And, their sense of adventure – to explore a world of precious avian creatures lost to us now at our own hands; to live in what I imagined to be, their world and to examine what it is in the human being that loved these birds to death either for beauty, sustenance or pure sport, in an extended work, has been a labor of love. With this piece, I wanted to celebrate these beauties; these birds.The poetry of Holly J. Hughes and her moving book of avian elegies has opened worlds to me and I hope Spectral Spirits might open a window to listeners as well.”
Conductor Donald Nally adds, “Edie and I knew we wanted to make a piece about the beauty of our world and the loss we feel as some of it disappears. Her suggestions of Holly Hughes poems and subsequent integration of bits of Thoreau and other naturalists is brilliant; the result is an inspired journey and music that feels strangely close to the extinct creatures about which we sing. We are so grateful for her investment, which is clearly from the heart."
Program Information
The Crossing @ Christmas
Presented by the Annenberg Center
Friday, December 20, 2019 at 7:30pm
Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square | Philadelphia, PA
Link: https://www.crossingchoir.org/
The Crossing @ Christmas
Saturday, December 21, 2019 at 12:30pm and 3:30pm
The Met Cloisters | New York, NY
Link: https://www.crossingchoir.org/
The Crossing @ Christmas
Sunday, December 22, 2019 at 5:00pm
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill | Philadelphia, PA
Link: https://www.crossingchoir.org/
Program:
Edie Hill – Spectral Spirits (World Premiere)
David Lang – the little match girl passion (2008)
Performers:
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
About The Crossing
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 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 three Grammy nominations in as many 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, The Mann Center in Philadelphia, 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.
With a commitment to recording their commissions, The Crossing has fifteen commercially-released recordings, two Grammy Awards, and three nominations. Their 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. 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, 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
*Image at top of release by Christian Stewart
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