Sin Eating

Three-time Grammy Award-winning choir The Crossing, led by conductor Donald Nally, announces its 2023-2024 Season: Sin Eating. Furthering the group’s reputation as a leader in creating and producing new music, The Crossing presents a number of new commissions and world premieres by composers Tania León, Ayanna Woods, David T. Little, Gabriela Ortiz, Gavin Bryars, and David Lang, plus The Crossing’s second Resident Composer, Nina Shekhar. The choir continues work on a number of recording projects this season, while presenting concerts in their home base of Philadelphia, PA, and touring for two residencies at Harvard University and Yale University, a world premiere performance at Rice University’s new Brockman Hall for Opera in Houston, and a return to the Netherlands following the choir’s groundbreaking European premiere performance of Ted Hearne’s FARMING this summer. In the 2023-2024 Season: Sin Eating, The Crossing also presents the return of their acclaimed series, The Crossing @ Christmas and The Month of Moderns.

Building on its Resident Composer initiative launched during the 2022-23 season, The Crossing has named composer and multimedia artist Nina Shekhar its second Resident Composer for 2023-2024. Shekhar has been described as “tart and compelling” (The New York Times), “vivid” (Washington Post), and an “orchestral supernova” (LA Times) and her work has been commissioned by major orchestras and ensembles across the US. As Resident Composer, Shekhar will take part in the development of the premieres of other composers, and will compose a new, substantial choral work for The Crossing, premiering in the 2024-2025 Season. The Crossing’s first ever Resident Composer was Ayanna Woods, who has been central to a new partnership with Pennsylvania Girlchoir developing musical material for a new composition to be premiered during The Crossing’s first concert of the season. The partnership with the Pennsylvania Girlchoir will expand with Shekhar’s residency. 

The Crossing kicks off the 2023-2024 season with Crickets in our Backyard on Wednesday, September 16, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill with the world premiere of a new work from Tania León, based on poetry of US Poet Laureate Rita Dove and featuring renowned flutist and MacArthur Fellow Claire Chase, a frequent collaborator with conductor Donald Nally. The work is performed alongside a reprisal of Wang Lu’s At Which Point, a 2021 commission on poetry by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander, and the world premiere of the aforementioned new work from The Crossing’s 2022-2023 Resident Composer, Ayanna Woods. On Monday, September 18, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. The Crossing takes this program to Battell Chapel as part of the choir’s residency at Yale University, and then to Paine Hall on Thursday, September 21, 2023, at 7:00 p.m. as part of the choir’s residency at Harvard University. 

The Crossing is joined by The Ragazze Quartet (of Amsterdam) and theatrical director Jorinde Keesmaat for another commissioned world premiere: Sin-Eater: a ritual grotesque by David T. Little, with performances on Saturday, October 14, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, October 15, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. b 7:00 p.m. at Penn Live Arts. Little describes his piece as a “work of ritual music-theatre for choir and string quartet, exploring the nature of power in western civilization through its connection to food and consumption.” The idea of the sin-eater derives from Welsh folklore in which a person of low class would be paid to take on the sins of a person of a higher class by way of consuming a loaf of bread and bowl of beer, which had ritually absorbed the wealthier person’s sins in a kind of “inverted Eucharist in which the rich exploit the poor for spiritual gain.” The world premiere performance of Sin-Eater in Philadelphia is followed by its European premiere at November Music in Den Bosch and Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam) in the Netherlands.

The Crossing @ Christmas returns with the world premiere of poor hymnal, a major new work from David Lang on Friday, December 15, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. at Iron Gate Theatre and Sunday, December 17, 2023 at 5:00 p.m. at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, PA. The concert-length work considers the words of hymnals, which are woven into many varying religions as a catalog of ideals worshipers agree upon; ideals such as how we treat and care for others, particularly those who are less fortunate. In poor hymnal, Lang adds to this tradition, posing the question of whether the hymns we’re singing today are truly reflective of a society that feels a responsibility to care for and support one another.

The Crossing partners with theatrical director Steven Jimenez for the world premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness on Saturday, January 20, 2024 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Inspired by James Drake’s epic drawing of the same title, Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness is an immersive performance that unfolds in five movements, with text and lyrics by award-winning author Benjamin Alire Sáenz that tells a story from the perspective of “the Earth, the Land, the Soil, the Sand,” which “do not demand our daughters and our sons as sacrifices.” The multidisciplinary collaboration features stage movement by artist Shaun Leonardo, accompanied by local US military veteran performers; additional music by master flutist Alejandro Escuer; and a dance ensemble from Houston Ballet Academy. 

March finds The Crossing invested in the third of three major works that British composer Gavin Bryars has written for them. The recording of the first, The Fifth Century, went on to become The Crossing’s first Grammy nomination and award. The second, A Native Hill, has become one of the most monumental and beloved of The Crossing’s ever-expanding repertoire for unaccompanied choir. This new work, premiering Saturday, March 16, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, promises to be the crowning achievement of the unique, and deeply meaningful friendship between Gavin Bryars and The Crossing. 

The season concludes with two concerts presented as part of The Crossing’s The Month of Moderns annual festival of new music in June. MoM 1: Prairie in our Backyard is co-presented by Penn Live Arts and features baritone Davóne Tines in a program including Monochromatic Light by Tyshawn Sorey and Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman on Friday, June 14, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. and Saturday June 15, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. at the Icebox Project Space. Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania, Sorey’s critically acclaimed work is a tribute to both the deeply contemplative space of Rothko Chapel and Morton Feldman’s 20th-century masterpiece of the same name. Monochromatic Light features violist Wendy Richman, percussionist Tim Feeney, and keyboards by The Crossing’s collaborative keyboardist John Grecia. Both works are accompanied by new films from LA designer Brett Snodgrass. MoM 2, on Friday, June 28, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. in the urban bucolic setting of Awbury Arboretum in Germantown, draws on the setting for inspiration, with Ayanna Woods’s Prairie Smoke, Ēriks Ešenvalds’s Ancient Prairie, Vanessa Lann’s The Bird that was Trapped has Flown, and several works of Joseph C. Phillips and Gabriel Jackson.

The Crossing’s 2023-2024 season immediately follows a busy August, with the reprise of John Luther Adams’s Vespers of the Blessed Earth with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin on Saturday, August 12, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY. The group then travels to The Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm Wednesday, August 28, 2023, for a performance of Robert Maggio’s genre-bending Aniara, followed by an additional performance Friday, September 1, 2023, at the Rock Church in Helsinki.