The first week of the new year we spent together doing one of our favorite things: recording... David Shapiro’s moving, virtuosic, and sometimes funny magnum opus Sumptuous Planet (see November!).  

Our Shapiro Recording Team @ High Point, St. Peter's in the Great Valley

The last week of February we spent together doing another of our favorite things: premiering a new work. Jennifer Higdon’s probing, rich, inspiring The Absence, Remember (based on words of Athena Kildegaard – mother of Anika, our soprano!). We toured it – along with music of Caroline Shaw, Ayanna Woods, Edie Hill, and Shara Nova (with the red hair, below!) – to the University of Chicago, Ithaca and Dartmouth Colleges, and Cincinnati, where we sang for thousands of choral musicians as headliners of the national conference of the American Choral Directors Association.

In between the recording and tour, we won our third Grammy! For Born: music of Edie Hill and Michael Gilbertson. (Gary was thrilled; llamacorns are particularly interested in awards.)

Then we did it again (premiered, not Grammied) in March, when the sax masters of PRISM joined us for Martin Bresnick’s introspective, mature, biographical Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished, a work that feels very much complete and satisfying. Aaaaaand, we recorded that, of course.

Back at the High Point with PRISM and our Bresnick Recording Team!

While gathered together, we also workshopped Ted Hearne's FARMING, taking excerpts to an office park in Bucks County to record a wild music video with filmmaker Peter English.

April

Then we did it again (prepared a premiere... but you figured that out)…. the next day, beginning rehearsals for John Luther Adams’ monumental, elegiac, personal Vespers of the Blessed Earth – a world premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick…. but wait! Yannick became ill and, with little notice, Donald conducted the premieres at the Kimmel Center and Carnegie Hall (after which The New York Times called us, “one of our most consistently thrilling choral ensembles” – read the full review here).

Top photo: Donald conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra and The Crossing @ the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia (photo by Margo Reed).

Bottom (from left): onstage at Carnegie Hall; Donald with JLA in rehearsal; Gary's box seat!

May

Three weeks later we were back at it with the men of The Crossing, rehearsing for the premiere of Julia Wolfe’s solemn yet exuberant, mysterious yet revealing unEarth – this time with The New York Philharmonic. So fun to be making this art with friends, and the Financial Times said that we, with our colleagues The Young People’s Chorus of New York City, were “eloquent in their contrapuntal choral passages.”

Clockwise from top left: Gary studies the UnEarth score with Julia Wolfe; Donald leads rehearsal onstage at David Geffen Hall; Gary matches its new seats!; the 36 men of unEarth's world premiere.

And between these adventures with two of the great orchestras of the world, we released our recording of Shara Nova’s inspiring, honest, calming Titration on Navona Records. Gramophone’s review calls the album “explosive music-making…a remarkable cycle, remarkably performed and splendidly recorded” (thanks to our sound designer and engineer/producer, Paul Vazquez).

Purchase here. Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

June

Then came the Summer of No Rest, which was a hell of a lot of fun. It began with four weeks of work on the world-premiere of Ted Hearne’s ground-breaking, four-years-in-the-making FARMING. A lot of late-June rain did not stop us from presenting it at beautiful Kings Oaks Farm, where we’d begun our 2022-2023 season. Fully staged, fully amplified, it is a romp like no other – to quote NPR: “In a word, wild. …twitchy, allusive, often synthetic and surrealistic…a full sensory overload.”

Top (from left): Farming signs by Nia Easley, our performance venue in an old airplane hangar!

Bottom: Farming costumes by Rebecca Kanach (photo by Peter English)

July

Then July was here, and we took FARMING to a sold-out performance at the Big Sing in Haarlem. (Thank you Neil Wallace!) We love singing in the Netherlands, so we also gave a concert of Shara Nova's Titration to the remarkable Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam!

The Crossing at Schuur in Haarlem and onstage at Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam.

Not satisfied just yet, we then took FARMING to the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts (where The New York Times stopped by, calling us “precise and luminous…” in work that is “the sweetest, saddest song”).

August

August arrived, and we were not yet finished with upstate New York, turning around to take JLA’s Vespers of the Blessed Earth to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick…Yes! This time Yannick conducted John’s great lament for the living things of our world, and we enjoyed a few days on SPAC’s beautiful campus. 

Yannick with Gary (left) and Donald (right) – in rehearsal and performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Saratoga Performing Arts Center

Continuing to live in that space – the one where we tell stories of the Earth and our relationship to it – we resurrected Rob Maggio’s fantastic, sci-fi, emotional Aniara: fragments of time and space with our friends at Klockriketeatern, We took it to the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm and the famed “Rock Church” (Temppeliaukio) in Helsinki. (Thanks, Dan Henricksson for insisting we revive this amazing work…and the costumes that go with it!)

September

A new season, 2023-2024: Sin Eating, launched in mid-September with two world premieres: Singsong from Tania León (a challenging and inspiringly new sound world for us, in a work based on Rita Dove’s cricket poems) and Infinite Body from Ayanna Woods (an extraordinary journey and a remarkable “fit” for us, the culmination of her role as our first Resident Composer in the previous season).

The irrepressible Claire Chase brought her flutes along (whoa – there’s only one Claire) and navigated Tania’s piece superbly in the Philadelphia premiere, and then on our tour to Yale and Harvard. To round out the program, we did the “indoor premiere” of Wang Lu’s mournful, kaleidoscopic At Which Point, a pandemic-era piece previously only heard outside! 

Clockwise from top left: post-recording pics at High Point, Malvern, PA with Ayanna Woods; Singsong rehearsal with Claire Chase and her contrabass flute at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill; Gary checks his stand height in Paine Hall @ Harvard; settling in at Yale's Battell Chapel.

October

A big surprise in October; we were named Musical America’s 2024 Ensemble of the Year. (We’re looking forward to January, when it becomes “real.”) Gary, of course, took the week off and beamed. He just loves that kind of stuff, while the rest of us are on to the next thing…

…which began the day after the “Ivy League Tour”: the title work of our current season, David T. Little’s masterful, frightening, thought-provoking SIN-EATER. We were joined in mid-October by our new friends of the Bergamot Quartet for a semi-staged co-presentation with Penn Live Arts, just one of our three collaborations with the folks at Annenberg Center in 2023.

November

We reached back to our work of that first week of January and released our album of David Shapiro’s Sumptuous Planet (with tremendous help from Carol Westfall and the Neubauer Family Foundation). The work is huge and Richard Dawkins’ words are nothing short of oracular; the result is a literal “record of our time,” born of a friendship with a composer that predates The Crossing. 

Purchase here.

Streaming on Spotify and Apple Music.

And, then Gary got really, really excited. In November, we were nominated for our ninth Grammy Award. For the rest of us, it was a moving moment to see our twelve-composer project Carols after a Plague recognized, and to realize just how integrated into our lives is Shara Nova! We sing her music on Carols, on our February tour, on our April album release. (It’s so nice to have friends who hang around.) For Gary, however, it’s all about basking in the glamour of the moment. 

Purchase here.

Streaming on Spotify and Apple Music.

December

Finally, December. David Lang’s poor hymnal. A stark, raw, profound work. (Donald says he has “waited his whole life for, without knowing it.”) After eight previous works for The Crossing, David, the composer we most frequently collaborate with, wrote a full, concert-length work. And we recorded it “on retreat in Bloomsbury, New Jersey” at Jim Cotter’s wonderful new studio. (Thanks, Jim!)   

Left to Right, The Crossing @ Christmas at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia; post-recording with David Lang in Bloomsbury, NJ

Wish