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Meciendo

Christopher Jessup composer
Anne Kilstofte composer
Carol Barnett composer
Deborah Kavasch composer
Karen Siegel composer
Leanna Kirchoff composer

The Crossing
Donald Nally conductor

Release Date: October 25, 2024
Catalog #: NV6675
Format: Digital
21st Century
Vocal Music
Choir

The multi-GRAMMY® award winning ensemble The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, delivers an enthralling program of contemporary choral compositions with MECIENDO from Navona Records. New works from six composers unknown to one another and yet wondrously aligned; their music weaves together seamlessly, even mystically, into a meaningful story of spirituality and interconnectedness. Warmth and sparkle alternate effortlessly in the choral textures created by this renowned ensemble, enveloping listeners in a sound that travels from the closed arms of a loved one to the stars above. Available in stereo and Dolby Atmos immersive audio formats, MECIENDO blends the intimate and the profound in an awe-inducing performance.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 When All Falls Silent Carol Barnett The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor 3:08
02 Meciendo Leanna Kirchoff The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor 5:31
03 Astronomia: II. The Mississippi at Midnight Christopher Jessup The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor 2:04
04 Love Lines Karen Siegel The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor 4:10
05 Feather on God's Breath Deborah Kavasch The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor 3:57
06 Holy Waters: pond 1: womb Leanna Kirchoff The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor 3:12
07 Holy Waters: pond 5: font Leanna Kirchoff The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor 2:42
08 The Starlight Night Anne Kilstofte The Crossing | Donald Nally, conductor 3:01

Recorded March 6-8, 2024 at St. Peter’s Church in the Great Valley in Malvern PA
Session Producer & Engineer Paul Vazquez
Editing, Mixing & Mastering Paul Vazquez
Immersive Audio Engineer Paul Vazquez

Executive Producer Bob Lord

VP of A&R Brandon MacNeil
A&R Danielle Sullivan

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette
Production Manager Martina Watzková
Production Assistant Adam Lysák

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Aidan Curran
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Carol Barnett

Composer

Carol Barnett writes audacious and engaging music. She is known for breaking the mold with meter changes, differing tonal centers, unusual instrument combinations, and her love of fast tempi. Despite these typical thumbprints, Barnett’s works are diverse, uncovering the needs of each piece and each text with her characteristic integrity. Barnett’s varied catalog includes works for solo voice, piano, chorus, diverse chamber ensembles, orchestra, and wind ensemble. 

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Leanna Kirchoff

Composer

A native of rural Colorado, Leanna Kirchoff’s music career began in a farmyard, singing her own songs to an audience of family and a few barn cats. Her early musical development also included studying piano and accompanying the choir at her local church. Kirchoff credits these early experiences as the genesis for her work as a composer whose catalog of music has grown to include many kinds of songs, musical theater pieces, sacred and non-liturgical choral music, and operas.

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Christopher Jessup

Composer

Multi award-winning composer and pianist Christopher Jessup is an artist of formidable prowess. Jessup has garnered acclaim for his “imaginative handling of atmosphere” [Fanfare] and his “high standard of technique” [New York Concert Review], cementing himself as one of the foremost composer-performers of his generation. 

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Karen Siegel

Composer

Composer Karen Siegel creates innovative, engaging, and meaningful choral and vocal works. Hailed as “colorful and at times groovy” (WQXR.org), her works are frequently performed by the New York City-based ensemble C4: the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, which she co-founded in 2005. Recent commissions include the choral sound installation "Lessons of Stone," for the Astoria Choir at the Noguchi Gallery in Long Island City; and the feminist collaborative work Vision of Flight for the Danish National Girls’ Choir and cellist Henrik Dam Thomsen.

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Deborah Kavasch

Composer

Deborah Kavasch, BMI composer, soprano, educator, and specialist in extended vocal techniques, has had works commissioned and performed in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, and China. She has received grants and residencies in composition and performance, was a 1987 Fulbright Senior Scholar to Stockholm, and has appeared in major international music centers and festivals in concerts, solo recitals, workshops, lecture/demonstrations, and television and radio broadcasts since 1981.

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Anne Kilstofte

Composer

Arizona composer Dr. Anne Kilstofte (Kilz-tofft) spent her early winters in Minnesota amid her mother’s paint tubes and pastels, but her father’s influence also played a role by sharing his recordings, introducing her to a wealth of composers including Shostakovich, Grieg, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, Brahms, Dvorak, Schubert, and even Big Band to name just a few. This early introduction is her earliest memory of a world where she was encouraged to create and use her imagination. Her use of color and lyricism and her adeptness at writing for voice may stem from this. Critics often mention her writing using “exceptional variety of tone color, conjuring landscapes that are sometimes misty, sometimes luminous, always atmospheric…” (International Alliance for Women in Music).

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Donald Nally

Donald Nally

Conductor

Donald Nally collaborates with creative artists, leading orchestras, and art museums to make new works for choir that address social and environmental issues. He has commissioned nearly 200 works and, with his ensemble The Crossing (Musical America’s 2024 Ensemble of the Year), has produced 35 albums, winning three GRAMMY® Awards for Best Choral Performance, while nominated nine times. 

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Vocal ensemble The Crossing posing outdoors in a green field in front of several trees.

The Crossing

Choir

The Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally, dedicated to performing new music and committed to addressing social, environmental, and political issues through nearly 180 commissioned premieres. Collaborating with prestigious ensembles and venues like the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall, The Crossing has released 35 albums, earning three GRAMMY® Awards for Best Choral Performance and multiple nominations. The Crossing is Musical America's 2024 Ensemble of The Year.

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Isobel Anthony
Jessica Beebe 3
Steven Berlanga
Karen Blanchard
Steven Bradshaw 3
Abigail Chapman
Tyrone Clinton
Matt Cramer
Malcolm Cooper
Ryan Fleming
Steven Hyder
Lauren Kelly 2
Anika Kildegaard 1, 2
Heidi Kurtz
Sylvia Leith
Andrew Major
Maren Montalbano 3
Daniel O’Dea 3
Ben Perri
Olivia Prendergast
Thann Scoggin 3
Rebecca Siler 2
Daniel Taylor 2
Shari Wilson

Solos
1 The Starlight Night
2 Holy Waters
3 Meciendo

Donald Nally, conductor
Kevin Vondrak, assistant conductor and artistic associate
Andrew Major, collaborative keyboardist
Michael Hawes, trumpet

Notes

In 2019, I was invited to participate in the first King’s Singers New Music Prize competition; this resulting piece earned a commendation from the jury. The text, one of several choices offered to the contestants, is by Charles Anthony Silvestri, regular collaborator with Eric Whitacre and many other contemporary composers. It was a pleasure to transform his evocative words (“the song’s amber light;” “My heart-song… rises from the mist”) into choral beauty.

— Carol Barnett

When all falls silent,
And the breath of life
Flows from the source
And calms the stormy sea,
My heart-song,
Always sung but seldom heard,
Rises from the mist,
Calling, calling…

Then, slowly,
I turn my gaze,
Drawn toward beauty
And the song’s amber light;
I open my soul,
And I am at peace,
I am in harmony,
Listening, listening…

Charles Anthony Silvestri

Chilean poet, educator, and diplomat, Gabriela Mistral’s, Meciendo (“Rocking”), was published in her 1924 collection of poems called Ternura (“Tenderness”). Primarily an elementary school teacher at the time, Mistral’s early poems often focused on themes of children and motherhood. The central image of this poem is a mother rocking her child amidst the sound of the sea and the wind outside. She is comforted by the loving wind and waves and by the unseen hand of the “Heavenly Father [who] silently rocks thousands of worlds.”

Meciendo was commissioned by Harmonia, a nine-member a cappella choir, whose nine independent parts dictated the structure of the piece. The most prominent soprano solo is sung in English, with echoes of Mistral’s Spanish chanted in the background evoking the wind and waves. Meciendo is the winner of the 2007 Sorel Medallion, an international choral competition sponsored by the Sorel Organization.

– Leanna Kirchoff

ES

Meciendo
by Gabriela Mistral

El mar sus millares de olas
mece divino.
Oyendo a los mares amantes
mezo a mi niño.

El viento errabundo en la noche
mece los trigos.
Oyendo a los vientos amantes
mezo a mi niño.

Dios Padre sus miles de mundos
mece sin ruido.
Sintiendo su mano en la sombra
mezo a mi niño.

EN

Rocking
translation by Maria Giachetti in Gabriela Mistral: A Reader

The divine sea rocks its endless waves.
Listening to the loving seas
I rock my child.

At night, the vagabond wind sways the wheat.
Listening to the loving winds
I rock my child.

The Heavenly Father silently rocks thousands of worlds.
Sensing His hand in the shadow,
I rock my child.

“The Mississippi at Midnight” is the second movement of a set of a cappella choral works titled Astronomia. Composed in 2021, the set comprises three movements, each of which use poems about astronomy by American poet Walt Whitman. “The Mississippi at Midnight,” written in 1848, is a prime example of Whitman’s fascination with the spirituality found in nature, a transcendentalist ideology that is crucial to what makes his poetry truly and unabashedly American.

— Christopher Jessup

Love Lines is about interconnectedness and the role of loving relationships in fostering the development of the individual, using the metaphor of a children’s “connect the dots” puzzle. When I wrote the words and music in early 2020, little did I know how much the pandemic disruptions would soon stretch these “love lines” and bring their presence to the forefront.

The opening and closing sections focus on specific relationships, and include two elements I’m fond of — a rhythmic groove and a soaring melody. The middle section evokes the wondrous awe of our interpersonal connections making their way through space-time, with whirling motives building up joyfully.

I composed Love Lines for C4: the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, which premiered it with conductor Perry Townsend in 2022. I’m grateful to Donald Nally and The Crossing for recording it with superb musicianship and sensitivity.

— Karen Siegel

Feather on God’s Breath for an a capella mixed chorus was written for the second Hildegard Festival of Women in the Arts, held in March 2003 at California State University, Stanislaus. At the first festival held there in March 1999, poet Linda Bunney-Sarhad gave a reading of poems she had written in honor of the festival, of which this was one. The following excerpt from Hildegard von Bingen’s writings provided the inspiration for her poem and my setting:

Listen: There was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along.
Thus am I…. [1]

This I have known:
to rise, a white feather in perfect silence
upon the flowing voice,
a wisp of smoke, a dry leaf,
to wander widely on the warm breath
of Love.

This I also know:
to float, a stick on the tide,
now submerged,
now riding invisible currents,

Going I know not how,
until one day, when it shall please the King,
I shall sink gently gently into His hand.

© 1999 Linda Bunney-Sarhad, Used with permission.

— Deborah Kavasch

[1] Hildegard, trans. Christopher Page, Sequences and Hymns by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Hyperion A66039. Notes and translations included with recording.

Holy Waters is a culmination of three artists’ work — a painter, a poet, and a composer. We came together through an interdisciplinary commission project initiated by the Ars Nova Singers of Boulder CO. As a response to Elizabeth Woody’s mixed media painting, Pond 17, poet Erin Robertson wrote 17 short poems, each a reflection on a different body of water. I set three poems from this collection — pond 1: womb, pond 5: font, and pond 8: river — inspired by the unifying themes of birth, rebirth, baptism, and redemption. Robertson’s spare language in these poems suggested to me a meditative setting that repeats and cycles through many iterations of the text. Of the three movements, two are included on this recording (“womb” and “font”).

— Leanna Kirchoff

pond 1: womb
water heartbeat rock inhale exhale step sway

pond 5: font
candlesmoke and choking incense grease of chrism itch of lawn and lace tipping back an unsafe angle tears salt holy water presented named claimed

Stars are eternal images of life, love, hope, and redemption. Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets, uses words that make just speaking (or singing) them sensuous, textural, and expressive, and yet alludes to sacred hope as well. For example, he plays with the words “Glow,” and “Glory” as the thunder grows, breaks, and rumbles away; the words “Kiss, Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west” and “bless when I understand — lovely asunder starlight” suggests the imagery of what a starlight night might convey to us.

This Gerard Manley Hopkins poem comes from a book of poems as a series of smaller works under this title. This short verse speaks of the stars as the eternal images and references, either alluded to or used outright and are found in many of my works. Hopkins has a way of setting words that make just the speaking of them sensuous and expressive. As with all text settings I try to create imagery and musical expression of what the poet is trying to convey.

— Anne Kilstofte