textura

The Crossing: Carthage
Navona Records

Michael Gordon: Anonymous Man
Cantaloupe Music

Lucky is the composer whose work is performed by The Crossing, assured as that creator is that the vocal ensemble will give eloquent and exacting expression to the material in question. James Primosch and Michael Gordon are the latest beneficiaries of The Crossing's attention, their dramatically different works treated to equally committed performances by the Donald Nally-led ensemble on the two releases. Carthage and Anonymous Man uphold the Grammy Award-winning group's ongoing commitment to new works for choir, with The Crossing credited with twenty recordings to date and instrumental in the creation of nearly 100 commissioned premieres.

The six works on Carthage, five single-movement pieces and the sixth a mass in five parts, offer a comprehensive portrait of Primosch, his stylistic and emotional range well-accounted for by the recording. His is a refined music that can be intensely lyrical at one moment and impassioned the next, and it's not uncommon for a setting to be informed by his work as a church musician. As precise as the choir's delivery is, it's not without emotion. Voices soar gloriously on these recordings, with rich contrasts between male and female voices and upper and lower registers adding to the impact. The words spiralling ecstatically, the title of one of the six compositions on Carthage, captures the essence of the choir's vocal character when so many performances feature voices bound in stirring communion.

Thoughtfully sequenced, Carthage begins with the short Journey, a hushed meditation in which the group's lustrous male voices sing words based on writings by Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), the devotional character of Primosch's music evident. The titular work follows with text by Marilynne Robinson from her novel Housekeeping brought to vivid life by the full ensemble. The composer in this instance responded to the destroyed city of Carthage as a metaphor for desire and imagination (“So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again”) with music extending from introspection to exuberance. Resplendent vocal polyphony makes good on the promise of spiralling ecstatically, a setting of a 1962 e.e. cummings poem that ends rapturously with repeated utterances of “all creation sings.” The sumptuousness of the choir's sound is never more apparent than during the crystalline harmonizing that distinguishes Two Arms of the Harbor, its text by Thomas Merton. Mirroring the short opener is One with the Darkness, One with the Light, whose text by Wendell Berry (“When I rise up, let me rise joyful like a bird / When I fall, let me fall without regret, like a leaf”) Primosch tonally replicates with gently cascading harmonic textures.

While all such pieces speak to the artistry of all involved, it's the five-movement Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus that is, literally and figuratively, the centrepiece (at twenty-seven minutes, it accounts for half the recording's total). Here the composer's focus is St. Thomas Didymus (“doubting Thomas”), whose insistence on seeing and touching Jesus before believing in the Resurrection evokes the tension between doubt and belief. The intricate work is artful in design and execution: whereas four soloists sing the Latin texts, the main choir sings excerpts from a cycle of poems by Denise Levertov inspired by the Mass texts. Individual voices appear exultantly alongside full-group outpourings as Primosch draws on liturgical music, Bach, and Gregorian chant. Different moods naturally emerge from one movement to the next, the celebratory “Gloria” in marked contrast to the temperate “Credo” and the serene “Agnus Dei.”

Dramatically unlike Carthage in character is Michael Gordon's Anonymous Man, written for and premiered by The Crossing in July 2017. Nearly an hour long and scored for twenty-four unaccompanied voices, the nine-part work by the Bang on a Can co-founder centers on the Manhattan area he's called home since 1981. Gordon inhabits a loft in a one-time Romanoff Caviar factory on Desbrosses Street, which in the early ‘80s was an industrial warehouse district but is now a residential area in Tribeca. In the text Gordon shares details about meeting his future wife, fellow composer Julia Wolfe (“It's Julie Passing Through Town”), and conversations with two homeless men, background that gives Anonymous Man a powerful personal resonance. Adding to that is the character of the text, which presented in the form of a plainspoken first-person account amplifies the intimate quality of the work. While Gordon's life advances against a backdrop that includes the horrors of 9/11 (“On That Terrible Beautiful Morning”), the work also includes historical details about Abraham Lincoln's funeral cortege, which could be seen from Desbrosses Street after it left Jersey City and traveled across the Hudson River by ferry.

The New Yorker has called Gordon Bang on a Can's “resident experimentalist,” and the description fits: his works are explorative, imaginative, always capable of surprise and reflective of his compositional sensibility. No electronics or other instruments are present to help establish his voice, but it comes through clearly in the work. One generally comes away from a Gordon piece struck by arresting gestures, and this one's no exception. Each part is distinct from the others, yet unity is achieved by their shared part in the story and unaccompanied vocalizing of the choir.

If a minimalistic quality is sometimes present in the modest number of units deployed, he maximizes their impact through the use of polyphony, repetition, and counterpoint. Vocal fragments are staggered such that in “A Tale,” for instance, a unit as small as a word or two builds into a loop-like swirl, a hypnotic spell cast when male and female voices weave into a dense, call-and-response-like construction. Urgency drives the intricate lines coursing through “I Moved,” an eleven-minute recounting of Gordon's arrival at the abandoned factory and a detailed inventory of the loft's sorry state and his graduate student life at the time. As text is enunciated clearly by one set of singers, others enact a glossolalic backdrop that suggests a kind of semi-delirious panting, all the elements gradually converging until what remains is a convulsive, bellowing mass.

The world outside the loft emerges in “On Desbrosses Street” in the form of Larry, a homeless man the composer remembers as “quiet and sweet, muttering, waving” (and, as recounted in “One Day I Saw,” who later dies, with flowers, candles, and hand-written notes placed near the alcove where he slept serving as a make-shift memorial), and again in “I First Noticed Robinson” with its detailed remembrance of the bookish homeless man who spent his days, Sisyphus-like, moving his belongings about the neighbourhood. The closing section, “I Sleep At Home,” lists all of the comforts Gordon enjoys in his home, the move accentuating everything anonymous figures like Larry and Robinson struggle to survive without.

“On That Terrible Beautiful Morning” includes perhaps the work's most striking melodic gesture in vocal glissandos that rise and fall like a roller-coaster, the beauty of the sound sharply contrasting with the tragic events of that September day (“The sun was shining and on that terrible beautiful morning, everything ran in slow motion / Eerie hushed chaos enveloped the streets, smoke and flames pouring out above us”). The elegance of Gordon's vocal arrangements and the purity of the choir's voices prove a superb match throughout the recording. Anonymous Man feels, on the one hand, haunting and dreamlike, yet, on the other, very much grounded in reality due to the down-to-earth character of the text. As much as Primosch and Gordon benefit from The Crossing's committed performances of their works, the choir is equally benefited by having material of such fine quality to perform. While the pieces are extremely different from one another, both releases make for superb additions to the choir's ever-growing discography.

June 2020


	The Crossing: Carthage Navona Records Michael Gordon: Anonymous Man Cantaloupe Music Lucky is the composer whose work is performed by The Crossing, assured as that creator is that the vocal ensemble will give eloquent and exacting expression to the material in question. James Primosch and Michael Gordon are the latest beneficiaries of The Crossing's attention, their dramatically different works treated to equally committed performances by the Donald Nally-led ensemble on the two releases. Carthage and Anonymous Man uphold the Grammy Award-winning group's ongoing commitment to new works for choir, with The Crossing credited with twenty recordings to date and instrumental in the creation of nearly 100 commissioned premieres. The six works on Carthage, five single-movement pieces and the sixth a mass in five parts, offer a comprehensive portrait of Primosch, his stylistic and emotional range well-accounted for by the recording. His is a refined music that can be intensely lyrical at one moment and impassioned the next, and it's not uncommon for a setting to be informed by his work as a church musician. As precise as the choir's delivery is, it's not without emotion. Voices soar gloriously on these recordings, with rich contrasts between male and female voices and upper and lower registers adding to the impact. The words spiralling ecstatically, the title of one of the six compositions on Carthage, captures the essence of the choir's vocal character when so many performances feature voices bound in stirring communion. Thoughtfully sequenced, Carthage begins with the short Journey, a hushed meditation in which the group's lustrous male voices sing words based on writings by Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), the devotional character of Primosch's music evident. The titular work follows with text by Marilynne Robinson from her novel Housekeeping brought to vivid life by the full ensemble. The composer in this instance responded to the destroyed city of Carthage as a metaphor for desire and imagination (“So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again”) with music extending from introspection to exuberance. Resplendent vocal polyphony makes good on the promise of spiralling ecstatically, a setting of a 1962 e.e. cummings poem that ends rapturously with repeated utterances of “all creation sings.” The sumptuousness of the choir's sound is never more apparent than during the crystalline harmonizing that distinguishes Two Arms of the Harbor, its text by Thomas Merton. Mirroring the short opener is One with the Darkness, One with the Light, whose text by Wendell Berry (“When I rise up, let me rise joyful like a bird / When I fall, let me fall without regret, like a leaf”) Primosch tonally replicates with gently cascading harmonic textures. While all such pieces speak to the artistry of all involved, it's the five-movement Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus that is, literally and figuratively, the centrepiece (at twenty-seven minutes, it accounts for half the recording's total). Here the composer's focus is St. Thomas Didymus (“doubting Thomas”), whose insistence on seeing and touching Jesus before believing in the Resurrection evokes the tension between doubt and belief. The intricate work is artful in design and execution: whereas four soloists sing the Latin texts, the main choir sings excerpts from a cycle of poems by Denise Levertov inspired by the Mass texts. Individual voices appear exultantly alongside full-group outpourings as Primosch draws on liturgical music, Bach, and Gregorian chant. Different moods naturally emerge from one movement to the next, the celebratory “Gloria” in marked contrast to the temperate “Credo” and the serene “Agnus Dei.” Dramatically unlike Carthage in character is Michael Gordon's Anonymous Man, written for and premiered by The Crossing in July 2017. Nearly an hour long and scored for twenty-four unaccompanied voices, the nine-part work by the Bang on a Can co-founder centers on the Manhattan area he's called home since 1981. Gordon inhabits a loft in a one-time Romanoff Caviar factory on Desbrosses Street, which in the early ‘80s was an industrial warehouse district but is now a residential area in Tribeca. In the text Gordon shares details about meeting his future wife, fellow composer Julia Wolfe (“It's Julie Passing Through Town”), and conversations with two homeless men, background that gives Anonymous Man a powerful personal resonance. Adding to that is the character of the text, which presented in the form of a plainspoken first-person account amplifies the intimate quality of the work. While Gordon's life advances against a backdrop that includes the horrors of 9/11 (“On That Terrible Beautiful Morning”), the work also includes historical details about Abraham Lincoln's funeral cortege, which could be seen from Desbrosses Street after it left Jersey City and traveled across the Hudson River by ferry. The New Yorker has called Gordon Bang on a Can's “resident experimentalist,” and the description fits: his works are explorative, imaginative, always capable of surprise and reflective of his compositional sensibility. No electronics or other instruments are present to help establish his voice, but it comes through clearly in the work. One generally comes away from a Gordon piece struck by arresting gestures, and this one's no exception. Each part is distinct from the others, yet unity is achieved by their shared part in the story and unaccompanied vocalizing of the choir. If a minimalistic quality is sometimes present in the modest number of units deployed, he maximizes their impact through the use of polyphony, repetition, and counterpoint. Vocal fragments are staggered such that in “A Tale,” for instance, a unit as small as a word or two builds into a loop-like swirl, a hypnotic spell cast when male and female voices weave into a dense, call-and-response-like construction. Urgency drives the intricate lines coursing through “I Moved,” an eleven-minute recounting of Gordon's arrival at the abandoned factory and a detailed inventory of the loft's sorry state and his graduate student life at the time. As text is enunciated clearly by one set of singers, others enact a glossolalic backdrop that suggests a kind of semi-delirious panting, all the elements gradually converging until what remains is a convulsive, bellowing mass. The world outside the loft emerges in “On Desbrosses Street” in the form of Larry, a homeless man the composer remembers as “quiet and sweet, muttering, waving” (and, as recounted in “One Day I Saw,” who later dies, with flowers, candles, and hand-written notes placed near the alcove where he slept serving as a make-shift memorial), and again in “I First Noticed Robinson” with its detailed remembrance of the bookish homeless man who spent his days, Sisyphus-like, moving his belongings about the neighbourhood. The closing section, “I Sleep At Home,” lists all of the comforts Gordon enjoys in his home, the move accentuating everything anonymous figures like Larry and Robinson struggle to survive without. “On That Terrible Beautiful Morning” includes perhaps the work's most striking melodic gesture in vocal glissandos that rise and fall like a roller-coaster, the beauty of the sound sharply contrasting with the tragic events of that September day (“The sun was shining and on that terrible beautiful morning, everything ran in slow motion / Eerie hushed chaos enveloped the streets, smoke and flames pouring out above us”). The elegance of Gordon's vocal arrangements and the purity of the choir's voices prove a superb match throughout the recording. Anonymous Man feels, on the one hand, haunting and dreamlike, yet, on the other, very much grounded in reality due to the down-to-earth character of the text. As much as Primosch and Gordon benefit from The Crossing's committed performances of their works, the choir is equally benefited by having material of such fine quality to perform. While the pieces are extremely different from one another, both releases make for superb additions to the choir's ever-growing discography. June 2020