Launched on April 4, 2025, At Which Level (New Focus Recordings) by The Crossing exemplifies the choir’s dedication to advancing the artwork of choral music via commissioning. With almost 170 unique works, typically targeted on themes of social justice and environmental points, this album presents three compelling items by Ayanna Woods, Wang Lu, and Tawnie Olson. By emphasizing creative expression in up to date contexts, The Crossing has curated an album that invitations listeners to interact deeply and thoughtfully.
The album opens with Woods’s multi-movement composition, Infinite Physique, which probes the methods people adapt and mildew themselves inside a capitalist framework. With a wealthy array of textures and tonal colours, the choir showcases its complexity as a creative car. The primary motion, “Infinite Development,” captures listeners with its intricate rhythmic patterns that shimmer over expansive, lush harmonies.
Woods’s compositional fashion artfully balances conventional sacred writing with revolutionary choral settings. Within the motion titled “One Physique,” the music serves as a rhythmic commentary on equipment and the complexities of societal order. The reflection deepens within the third motion, “Do Be Do,” which compellingly poses the query, “Do you are concerned about falling quick?” By means of eloquent harmonies and textures, this piece transforms a easy inquiry into an exploration of worry intertwined with societal expectations of productiveness and success. The album culminates with the motion “Golden Hour,” which introduces solo heterophonic moments that pierce via dense sound layers, yielding beautiful contrasts of lush harmonies and dissonance.
The title piece, At Which Level, composed by Wang Lu, includes a distinctive textual content setting for 2 surrealist poems by Forrest Gander. The primary motion, “Prologue,” embarks on a microtonal journey, showcasing polyphonic swoops and tone clusters that artfully conflict, making ready the listener for the next actions, “Beckoned” and “The Sounding.” “Beckoned” illustrates a vivid scene of swarming bees and a cab journey with a flute-playing driver, using a through-composed narrative fashion that successfully makes use of textual content portray to convey the story’s essence. In distinction, “The Sounding” begins with stark open fifths and profound gaps between basses and sopranos, making a resonant, cavernous environment. The soloists navigate this sonic house with dramatic glissandi—echoing birds in flight.
Because the motion progresses, Lu amplifies the ethereal nature of the textual content by incorporating mouth harps into the combination, creating an otherworldly sensation that transports the listener additional past the caverns she has initially crafted. Below the path of conductor Donald Nally, The Crossing demonstrates spectacular mastery, deftly balancing a variety of textures, vocal ranges, and complicated musical writing.
Subsequent, the album options Beloved of the Sky by Tawnie Olson, commissioned by the Barlow Endowment. This piece includes 5 journal entries by Canadian artist Emily Carr, who describes her artistic course of whereas specializing in typically ignored pure and Indigenous topics. Olson elevates these seemingly easy phrases past mere phrase portray, with masterful melodic repetition. As an example, in “I went down deep” and “I woke with this concept…,” Olson intricately layers voices and melodies, remodeling a unison right into a wealthy tapestry of concord over time.
The Crossing’s impeccable intonation and mix are notably evident within the opening of the third motion, “Oh, that stodgy, lumpy feeling,” which includes a balanced mix of homophony and delicate counterpoint. Olson’s dynamic contrasts and exact punctuation shine in “The topic meaning little,” respiration life into the guts of the textual content’s exploration. The album concludes with the motion “I made a small sketch,” which fantastically encapsulates the cycle, closing with contemplative calls and plush harmonizations.
The Crossing’s At Which Level is undoubtedly a must-listen and is deserving of a GRAMMY nomination this 12 months. With Nally’s distinctive conducting and the beautiful works by these composers, the album seamlessly intertwines delicate and highly effective moments all through its program.
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