THE CROSSING @ CHRISTMAS Returns For Two Holiday Performances In December

Grammy Award-winning choir The Crossing's holiday tradition The Crossing @ Christmas returns with two concerts featuring the world premiere of Ochre by Caroline Shaw alongside Mass Transmission by Mason Bates on Friday, December 16, 2022 at 7:00 p.m. at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Rittenhouse Square (co-presented by Penn Live Arts) and on Sunday, December 18, 2022 at 5:00 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill.

Although essentially mournful, Caroline Shaw's new work Ochre maintains a sense of joy and wonder regarding our planet. The work focuses primarily on timbres and vowels while drawing on fragments of poetry - namely Goethe, for whom a common mineral in ochres is named, and a lament of the Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez - framing human existence with metaphors of geologic time, iron ore, and rock.

"Ochre obliquely references how we consider and care for the ground beneath our feet," Shaw said. "Our Earth, ourselves, our histories, our sense of the scale of our lives in the context of geological history. It is also about color, and the sensation of music as color or as a complex concoction of materials that we perceive as a kind of color."

Organist Scott Dettra joins The Crossing for Mason Bates's Mass Transmission for organ and electronics-a colorful, innovative, original, and heart-wrenching piece that explores how the advent of radio technology brought us closer and yet magnified our distances and loneliness. The piece draws on radio-wave communications from the 1920s between parents in the Netherlands and their children in Java, who were sent there to work for the Dutch government.

True to the focus of these annual Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Concerts, The Crossing takes the opportunity at the holidays to explore relationships; how we treat others, and how we treat the earth, through the lenses of longing, distance, failure, and, ultimately, hope.

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Performance Details
THE CROSSING @ CHRISTMAS
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Scott Dettra, organ

Friday, December 16, 2022 at 7:00pm
Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square | 1904 Walnut Street | Philadelphia, PA
Tickets: $40
Ticket Link: https://pennlivearts.org/event/crossing-christmas-2022

Sunday, December 18, 2022 at 5:00pm
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill | 8855 Germantown Ave. | Philadelphia, PA
Tickets: $20 - $35
Ticket Link: https://www.crossingchoir.org/events/2022-23/christmas

Program:
Caroline Shaw - Ochre (World Premiere)
Mason Bates - Mass Transmission
Scott Dettra, organ
Paul Vazquez, sound design

Caroline Shaw's new work is commissioned for The Crossing, Cantori New York, Notre Dame Vocale, and Volti with funding provided by the Ann Stookey Fund for New Music.

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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 150 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 27 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.

Photo credit: Becky Oehlers Photography