Genre: Vocal Music

Recently named Musical America's 2024 Ensemble of the Year, Donald Nally's chamber choir The Crossing stuns with their latest studio album, WAYS YOU WENT. Vibrant, exhilarating, and uplifting, this new release features original compositions by composers Martin Bresnick and Mason Bates. WAYS YOU WENT is a yin and yang of interconnected opposites. Bresnick's song cycle Self-Portraits 1964 exclusively deals with the life and personality of a single man: young and intellectual, working as a trash collector to put himself through college, and escaping into literature at night. Bates' trilogy Mass Transmission takes a telegraph conversation between mother and daughter in the 1920s and sets it to music, contrasting the warmth of human communication and a mechanistic medium. Both of these cycles, one introspective, the other socially oriented, are snapshots of a time gone by. The Crossing brings both to life with perfect mastery.

The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally, returns to Navona Records with MOTION STUDIES, performing works by commissioned artist Justine Chen’s Shallow Breath and Stealth and commissioned artist Nicholas Cline’s watershed. Reflecting on a culture where data mining and government traceability have become normalized to the point of population complacency, Chen encapsulates the dissecting points of poet Jena Osman’s musings on the 21st-century reframing of paranoia, privacy, and the pervasive desire to run away from the data that follows us. Evidence of these reflections is present in the tittering, whispering, and often frantic conveyances of the ensemble in an unnerving collection of sequences that paint an antagonistic image of the modern machine. watershed designates motion as boundary rather than as escape: the movement of water as a crux point of political power and community resource. Joined by Matthew Levy on tenor sax, the ensemble ebbs with lap and flow as the American history of water is sung and dictated, leading the question of the damage nationalistic attitudes towards shared water resources have caused to our environment. A 2024 Best Choral Performance GRAMMY® nominee and multi-GRAMMY® winning ensemble, The Crossing continually proves itself to be at the forefront of new choral literature and performance. MOTION STUDIES is a release not to be missed.

Composer Peter Dayton and Navona Records present STORIES OUT OF CHERRY STEMS, an album of original vocal chamber music with carefully curated texts spanning multiple centuries. Soprano Katie Procell and numerous selected performers navigate a persistent tension between simplicity and complexity delicately threaded throughout the program, providing a solid stage for the texts of notable poets Pablo Neruda, Oscar Wilde, and more. The strengths of vocal and instrumental chamber music merge into a cohesive powerhouse in this recording, brimming with sung stories that compliment Dayton’s compositional style.

Carl Vollrath’s OLD AND NEW POETRY from Navona Records is a lovingly-prepared setting of the works of seminal poets William Blake and Sara Teasdale, as well as the contemporary writer John Gracen Brown. The verses chosen by Vollrath—including such varied selections as Blake’s “The Fly,” Teasdale’s “Dusk In War Time,” and Brown’s “The Coming of a Summer Rainstorm”—all reflect the composer’s belief in the interdependency of all life on earth. Employing piano, saxophone, and mezzo-soprano, Vollrath thoughtfully pushes tonal boundaries in response to the poetic language.