The Crossing: Meciendo
Navona Records

At twenty-eight minutes, Meciendo is a somewhat modest release by the acclaimed Donald Nally-led vocal ensemble The Crossing, but it's nevertheless a credible addition to its voluminous discography. With no guests involved, the release is a pure document of The Crossing's a cappella artistry, and the composers whose contemporary choral works are performed clearly benefit from the group's attention. There's nothing lacking in the performances when each piece is handled with the same kind of meticulousness the company brings to all of its projects.

The album's title derives from a work by Leanna Kirchoff, who's otherwise represented by two “pond” movements from Holy Waters. The other contributions come from composers Christopher Jessup, Anne Kilstofte, Carol Barnett, Deborah Kavasch, and Karen Siegel; adding to the modest character of the release, only two of the eight tracks push past four minutes, the longest five-and-a-half and most in the three-minute range. While not quite miniatures, the pieces might be likened to snapshots or bite-sized confections. Differences aside, the composers' pieces align together smoothly, such that Meciendo more registers as a cumulative statement than a collection of unrelated parts.

Opening the set is Barnett's When All Falls Silent, which was written for the first King's Singers New Music Prize competition and which earned a commendation from the jury. The text she chose to set (one of several made available to the contestants) is by Charles Anthony Silvestri, who collaborates regularly with Eric Whitacre. That alone ensures the music will be worth hearing, and Barnett honours his evocative words with a luminous expression that segues seamlessly from a hush to a roar and amplifies The Crossing's luscious vocal sound.

The first piece from Kirchoff, a native of rural Colorado whose early development involved studying piano and choir accompaniment at her local church, is Meciendo (“Rocking”), its text about a mother rocking her child against a soundtrack of sea and wind taken from Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral's 1924 collection Ternura (“Tenderness”). Adding to the allure of the piece, a prominent soprano solo is sung in English (“I rock my child”) while Spanish is chanted to impressionistically evoke the rhythmic lilt of wind and waves. The accessibility of the work belies its complexity as it arranges nine independent parts into an engrossing whole. Kirchoff's “pond 1: womb” and “pond 5: font,” two parts of three from Holy Waters, originated out of an interdisciplinary project involving three artists, a painter (Elizabeth Woody), poet (Erin Robertson), and composer. In response to Woody's mixed-media painting Pond 17, Robertson wrote seventeen minimal poems that each reflects on a different body of water. That prompted Kirchoff to select three poems and create intricately interwoven musical settings around themes of birth, rebirth, baptism, and redemption.

Written for the second Hildegard Festival of Women in the Arts in March 2003 at California State University, Kavasch's Feather on God's Breath was naturally inspired by an excerpt from Hildegard von Bingen's writings, in this case one about a king who, sitting on his throne, raised a feather from the ground and commanded it to fly, which it did, though not of its own volition but because the air bore it aloft to ride its “invisible currents." With voices overlapping and arranged in glorious counterpoint, the musical writing's both suitably majestic and delicate in evoking the royal personage and the physical object.

Jessup's “The Mississippi at Midnight” is the ethereal middle movement from a 2021 three-part set titled Astronomia. All three movements use as springboards poems about astronomy by Walt Whitman, with 1848's “The Mississippi at Midnight” a textbook example of the poet's preoccupation with the spiritual in nature. For The Starlight Night, Arizona composer Anne Kilstofte set music to words by poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that characterize stars as eternal images of life, love, hope, and redemption. Sympathetically matching music to text, Kilstofte creates a commanding expression of luminous splendour to evoke the awesome panorama that materializes nightly above us.

January 2025