Philadelphia’s The Crossing choir’s New York concert moves you enough to care about Immanuel Kant
The four-Grammy-award-winning choir takes on composers who may be new to some listeners, but not for long.
NEW YORK — Keeping up with The Crossing choir means attuning one’s ears to the ancient, the overlooked and the peripheral past to center one’s self in the group’s musical present.
The Crossing’s cluster of early-summer concerts and recordings under founder-director Donald Nally had the four-Grammy-award-winning choir taking on composers who reach for their own modern mode of expression through particularly distant sources.
The much-awarded David Lang drew on old, well-thumbed church hymnals that he has been collecting since his student years, resulting in poor hymnal that The Crossing recently recorded and released. The June 14 premiere of Gavin Bryars’ The Last Days of Immanuel Kant at Chestnut Hill drew from observation, whether sad or humorous, of this great figure from the Age of Enlightenmentconfronting the mysteries of aging — philosophically, of course.
The Crossing spent part of last week in Malvern recording Aaron Helgeson’s The Book of Never, not to be confused with the similarly titled Ashley Capes magic/adventure books, but based on a psalm book from 999 A.D. that had been compiled by a missionary in the Viking-founded, Russian-speaking city of Novgorod.
Those last two pieces were excerpted (Bryars) and reprised in full (Helgeson) at the Friday concert at St. Peter’s Church. It drew a near-full crowd.
Neither of these pieces claim to be a strict portrayal of their source material but were more of a creative launching pad — one that, in the Bryars piece, is no less eloquent for being a bit quiet.
British composer Bryars, now 82, came to fame as a conceptual-art descendant of John Cage, building pieces around “found sounds,” such as an unhoused man recorded on the street. One could never have predicted the composer’s recent earnest, reflective, subtle, restrained choral works.
Even the most sophisticated audiences, though, aren’t likely to come in with built-in sympathy for Kant’s final days. But that’s not a prerequisite. The choice of texts by Kant observer Thomas De Quincey describe the philosopher returning home, ill, and finding well-wishers clustered around his door; as well as how he found comfort amid his unpredictable decline.
Words that concern Kant’s outer life are prose with no apologies for being prosaic while riding the composer’s contours of choral sound that suggest Kant’s inner life, always lyrical but never with words shoehorned into a conventional melody.
Lots of choral techniques — a bit of Renaissance-era counterpoint, a long beautiful mezzo-soprano solo accompanied by tenors — are employed with self-effacing discretion, ending with quietly majestic low C for basses. Enough to make you care about Kant? Yes.
In contrast, the Book of Never was the big piece on the Friday concert, and it’s a bear, with huge, sometimes frenetic collages of sounds that shout, exalt, and, quite nearly, scream; repeated like incantations at first but growing into something obsessive, even manic. It’s all part of a singular, apocalyptic vision that apparently got its author, a monk named Isaakiy, excommunicated.
Photos of the actual book border on terrifying with layers of psalms scrawled on top of each other. The combination of that dire world view and the sense of hopeless alienation that comes with it is so in step with 2025.
Musically, the piece establishes Helgeson as a significant young composer. No music survives from the psalm book, but Helgeson has employed the kinds of chants that might’ve accompanied them, with his own electrifying sense of invention. The music doesn’t pioneer any new vocal techniques — it’s actually rather voice-friendly, especially the quieter passages that unfold gradually like an evolving hallucination — but has a feverish originality unlike anything I’ve heard in years.
The Crossing’s recording will be out next year.
Lang’s more mild-mannered poor hymnal, recently released on the Cantaloupe label, is a good antidote.
The piece might sound like an also-ran to the composer’s breakthrough Little Match Girl Passion, with choral writing that’s meaningfully fragmented with voices stumbling over each other in mildly exclamatory statements. While Match Girl tells a story, poor hymnal is a self-moral examination, starting with questions about social responsibility to the needy, in a moment of realization that seems to ask “Is this really happening?”
The music hits emphatic conclusions somewhere in the middle — with further rumination to come. It’s disarmingly intimate. But with The Crossing, disarming moments aren’t an accident; they’re the group’s mandate.
Next season’s concerts are planned from Hershey to Boston to New York and, of course, at the Philadelphia home base.
Many composer names are new to me — but won’t be for long.