SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Other Links

Editorial Board

Google Site Search

The Crossing @ Winter:  The Crossing, Donald Nally (conductor), Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 4.1.2009 (BH)

Bo Holten: First Snow (1996)
David Lang: I want to live (2005)
Erhard Karkoschka: Variationen mit Celan-Gedichten III (1997)
Paul Spicer: How Love Bleeds
Bo Holten: A time for everything (1996)
David Shapiro: It is time (2008, world premiere)
John Kennedy: Someday (2005)

The Crossing
Karen Rogers Blanchard
Steve Bradshaw
Maren Montalbano Brehm
Heather Cos
Micah Dingler
Jeff Dinsmore
Ryan Fleming
Steven Gearhart
Chris Hodges
Leslie Johnson
Rebecca Oehlers
Robert Philips
Susan Pollack
Lourin Plant
Rebecca Siler
Veronica Chapman Smith
Dan Spratlan
Rebecca Whitlow
Shari Alise Wilson
Steven Ziegler

Donald Nally, conductor
John Gracia, accompanist


In his comprehensive notes for this concert by the expert choir known as The Crossing, conductor Donald Nally comments on the recent renaissance of writer Paul Celan.  His evocative poems form the spine of The Celan Project, a series of works being rolled out on this program and in the future based on Celan's unusual texts.  To inaugurate the idea, Nally unearthed Erhard Karkoschka's Variationen mit Celan-Gedichten III, a strikingly original piece from 1997.  Now living in Stuttgart, Karkoschka runs through a spectrum of techniques—singing, speaking, humming and "timbre glissandos" that resemble Sprechstimme, all done with the group's characteristic range, precision and technical skill.  And later, Celan's It is time inspired the young composer David Shapiro to write an expressive setting of intimacy.  Shapiro's masterful setting climaxes with the gentle tolling of the title, fading into the distance.

In 2007 the ensemble performed David Lang's I lie, and similarly, his I want to live showed the expertise of the women's voices.  Like its spare music, the text is minimal: "I want to live where you live," a sentence that achieves a haunting profundity through repetition, each time seeming to pose the words in a different context.  In sharp contrast, the Finzi Singers' conductor and composer Paul Spicer counts Herbert Howells and Kenneth Leighton as teachers, and his style shares a similar universe.  Originally written for the Birmingham Bach Choir, How Love Bleeds is subtitled Four Carols for Dark Times, using texts by R.S. Thomas.  Rich, plummy hues make the most of a virtuoso choir, a lush contrast to some of the starkness elsewhere on the program.

Two works by Bo Holten, conductor of the Flemish Radio Choir, show the composer's expertise in onomatopoeic word painting: First Snow and A time for everything (both from 1996).  The former deploys high voices replicating falling snow, and the latter begins with a motif of ticking clocks.  Both are potent blends of tonal and non-tonal elements, with some of the simplest effects leaving the most lasting impression.  The afternoon concluded with John Kennedy's Someday, which for some in the audience may have served as a bit of balm following the earlier, more ear-stretching selections.  After pitting quietness against piercing climaxes, Kennedy uses a lyricall "noo" syllable as a velvet backdrop for the sopranos.  As an encore, the group repeated a portion of Holten's A time for everything—as Nally said, "the short, easy part."

Bruce Hodges


^{Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page}