THE CROSSING Opens 2026 with Performances at Carnegie Hall, Boston Symphony Hall, More

Four-time Grammy Award-winning professional choir The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally, continues its 21st season with performances at New York City’s Carnegie Hall as well as in Boston, California, and South Carolina, while also coming home for concerts in Philadelphia and nearby Hershey, Pennsylvania.

The renowned choral group will also return to the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville for the first time since 2017 to perform David Lang’s poor hymnal, the work that recently earned The Crossing its record 11th Grammy nomination across 10 consecutive years for Best Choral Performance.

The Crossing's performances at Boston Symphony Orchestra featuring David Lang’s poor hymnal (new edition) are on Thursday, January 29 at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, January 31 at 8 p.m.

The recording of poor hymnal earned The Crossing a 2026 Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance.

poor hymnal opens these BSO concerts; the second part of the concert finds the orchestra and gospel choirs giving the East Coast premiere of Carlos Simon’s Good News Mass, a celebratory homage to Black joy, spiritual discovery, and the power of faith.

poor hymnal was commissioned for The Crossing and Donald Nally by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting, Jill and Loren Bough, and Peggy and Mark Curchack.

The Crossing @ Stanford, featuring Harold Meltzer’s You Are Who I Love (2024, reprise) with Sandbox Percussion, along with works of Ēriks Ešenvalds and Sarah Rimkus, performs at Bing Concert Hall on Wednesday, February 25 at 7:30 p.m.

Harold Meltzer's collaboration with poet (and Stanford faculty) Aracelis Girmay, You Are Who I Love, produced one of his largest and most thoughtful works. With the four percussionists of Sandbox playing over 100 instruments, the work floats with ease from humor to defiance, intimacy to insistence. Meltzer, who died in August 2024, left a lasting gift to remind us of the value of hearing the unheard, seeing the unseen, and living a day, an hour, or just a moment in the life of another.

Meltzer’s work is bookended by music from Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds — his nearly symphonic The First Tears — and The Crossing’s 2024-2025 Resident Composer, Sarah Rimkus, whose gripping cantata, Babylon, captures the plight of the unseen and wandering.

The performance of You Are Who I Love was made possible through gifts from friends to the Harold Meltzer Memorial Recording Fund. You Are Who I Love was commissioned for The Crossing and Donald Nally by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting.

The performance of Tania León’s Singsong with Claire Chase, flutes; Wang Lu’s At Which Point; and Ayanna Woods’ Infinite Body at Derry Presbyterian Church in Hershey is on Saturday, March 21 at 5 p.m.

The performance, presented in partnership with Artcinia §, at St. Luke and the Epiphany in Philadelphia is on Sunday, March 22 at 4 p.m.

The performance at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City is on Tuesday, March 24 at 7:30 p.m.

These concerts mark the return of virtuosic flutist and MacArthur Fellow Claire Chase and the tsunami of energy that comes with her, as The Crossing revisits Rita Dove’s hard-edged, raw “cricket poems” in Tania León’s endlessly inventive Singsong, which dances its way through a journey of Black singers from pre-slavery to today.

Wang Lu’s At Which Point boldly explores the fragility and emptiness of grief found in Pulitzer-winning poet Forrest Gander’s world of those “left behind.”

Finally, Ayanna Woods’ Infinite Body, a co-commission of Carnegie Hall and The Crossing, explores how capitalism influences our relationship to our bodies, peering through the lenses of the natural world, burnout culture, and embodiment, to observe and unsettle the notion of our separateness.

David Lang’s poor hymnal (complete version) will be performed at Peace Concert Hall in Greenville, South Carolina on Thursday, March 26 at 8 p.m. Performances at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee are on Friday, March 27, at 8:45 p.m., and Saturday, March 28, at 1:30 p.m.

poor hymnal is a concert-length work written for The Crossing; it premiered in December 2023 and quickly became one of the group’s most frequently performed commissions. Called “music that doesn’t pull punches” by The Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns, it tries to get to the core of what a religious experience can be. “What I love about hymnals,” the composer writes in his liner notes to the album, “is that they’re a catalog of things a community of worshipers can agree on — a catalog that can be sung. And what the worshipers are singing about matters.”

Lang constructed the text by stitching together lines, phrases and poignant utterances from sources as varied as the Old Testament, Mahatma Gandhi, Barack Obama, and Tolstoy — to name just a few. The slowly unfurling hymns are poignant reminders to not only observe the conditions that other people endure but help whenever possible. It is timely work for times of seemingly boundless inequality. As Lang explained: “This piece is trying to say: The reason we are coming together is to remember how important we are to each other, and to remember how important it is that we take care of each other.”