April 9: The Crossing Releases Gavin Bryars’ A NATIVE HILL on Navona Records

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

The Crossing Releases
Gavin Bryars’ A NATIVE HILL

A Choral Meditation on
Our Relationship with Nature 

Out Digitally April 9 & Physically June 11 on Navona Records
Album Page: www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6347/  
Physical Copies Available Upon Request

“The Crossing [has a] gift for lending social activism poetic form”
– The New York Times

www.crossingchoir.org 

New York, NY (March 3, 2021) — On Friday, April 9, 2021, GRAMMY-winning prolific choir The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, releases its 24th commercial album, English composer Gavin Bryars’ concert-length musical essay A NATIVE HILL, on Navona Records. A Native Hill, based on the early writings of American author and activist Wendell Berry, is Bryars’ most substantial work for a cappella choir and was written as a gift for The Crossing. Physical CDs will be available on Friday, June 11, 2021.

The long-anticipated follow-up to Gavin Bryars’ The Fifth Century, which won The Crossing its first GRAMMY award in 2018, the 12-movement A Native Hill was premiered by the ensemble in October 2019 at their home, The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. Wendell Berry’s text, from his 1968 essay of the same title, offers meditations on how life is, and can be, experienced, through detailed descriptions of the minutiae of rural existence, where simple natural events reveal themselves as metaphors for universal truths. Bryars has a close working and personal relationship with The Crossing, and draws on his intimate knowledge of the singers’ individual characteristics to create a further thoughtful and even more profoundly meaningful work for the ensemble. The New York Times has called Bryars’ music “accessible and defiantly personal,” and A Native Hill exemplifies his organic synthesis of sophisticated musical ideas with an earthy, insightful understanding of daily life. 

Donald Nally, conductor of The Crossing, remarked, “The combination of Wendell Berry, with whom we share a deep (and at times outspoken) concern for our relationship with the earth, and Gavin Bryars, whose vocal writing for The Crossing can reach deep into memory and emotional introspection, is like many roads converging in an inevitable way. Gavin’s music inspires us to stop, listen, and ponder. It is less a call to action than an invitation to remember again the beauty of the natural world and the life available to those who listen to that world.” 

Of the world premiere, critic David Patrick Stearns wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “The final movement Sunday was punctuated by a chord built on 24 gently dissonant pitches, creating a sonority unlike anything I’ve heard — something that can only be vaguely compared to what might happen if someone lay down on an organ keyboard. The expression of that sound simultaneously conveyed exaltation and unresolvable grief, suggesting what the composer experienced this past year with the death of a loved one and birth of a granddaughter while he was writing A Native Hill. The chord is also borderline impossible to sing, but The Crossing under conductor Donald Nally seemed not to break a sweat. Elsewhere in the piece, the closer you listened, the more it was anything but what it seemed to be.”

A Native Hill is dedicated to Bryars’ granddaughter and is in memory of her father, whose sudden death during the writing of A Native Hill, had a profound impact on the work. 

About Gavin Bryars
Gavin Bryars, born in 1943, studied philosophy but became a jazz bassist and pioneer of free improvisation with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Early iconic pieces The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet achieved great popular success. Works include five operas, a large body of chamber music, several concertos and much vocal music including 6 books of madrigals - performers include The Hilliard Ensemble, Trio Mediaeval, Red Byrd, Latvian Radio Choir, Estonian National Male Choir, Iarla O'Lionaird, Singer Pur and The Crossing, whose recording of The Fifth Century was awarded a GRAMMY. He has collaborated widely with visual artists (Juan Muñoz, Bruce McLean), choreographers (William Forsythe, Merce Cunningham, Edouard Lock, David Dawson, Carolyn Carlson), theatre directors (Robert Wilson, Atom Egoyan), as well as writing music for the films of his wife Anna Tchernakova. He has also worked with non-classical performers such as Charlie Haden, Bill Frisell, Tom Waits, Natalie Merchant, Gavin Friday, Father John Misty, Bertrand Belin, Mocke. Since 1986 he has performed internationally and recorded with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, his preferred performers. A French book on his work, Gavin Bryars, en paroles et musique, appeared in 2020 and a second book is due for publication in England in April 2021 He lives in a Leicestershire village and on Vancouver Island. He is a Transcendent Satrap and a Regent of the Collège de ’Pataphysique and has made many recordings - for ECM, Point, Philips, Naxos, Decca, and his own label GB Records. Learn more at www.gavinbryars.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 120 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 24 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.  

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 their distributed labels has been featured in settings from CBS to Carnegie Hall, Microsoft to the Musikverein, and Nintendo to National Geographic. The 2019 Navona Records release from The Crossing THE ARC IN THE SKY was nominated for a 2020 GRAMMY Award and the 2020 Navona Records release CARTHAGE was nominated for a 2021 GRAMMY Award.

A NATIVE HILL Track List

Gavin Bryars (b. 1943) – A Native Hill (2019)
     1. i. The Sense of the Past [6:39]
     2. ii. The Path [4:43]
     3. iii. Sea Level [5:08]
     4. iv. The Pool [3:18]
     5. v. The Road [8:14]
     6. vi. The Music of Streams [8:20]
     7. vii. Questions [5:14]
     8. viii. Topsoil [4:27]
     9. ix. The Hill [3:36]
     10. x. Animals and Birds [4:16]
     11. xi. Shadow [5:02]
     12. xii. At Peace [9:36]

The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Kevin Vondrak, assistant conductor
John Grecia, keyboards

Executive Producer Bob Lord
Executive A&R Sam Renshaw
A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
VP, Audio Production Jeff LeRoy
Audio Director Lucas Paquette
VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Patrick Niland, Sara Warner

Recording Produced by Donald Nally, Paul Vazquez & Kevin Vondrak
Additional Engineering, Editing, Mixing & Mastering Paul Vazquez 
Album Artwork by Steven Bradshaw

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