Sunday, January 22, 2012 3:00 – 5:00 PM
WRTI – 90.1FM, Philadelphia
and online anywhere: www.wrti.org
From The Crossing: “Vespers, the work that brought Kile Smith into our lives and hearts, recorded live in concert at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill on Sunday January 8th, 2012 in a joyful collaboration with Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, will be the first broadcast in a series of live Crossing concerts on WRTI, 90.1FM, Philadelphia.
The remainder of the program will include two pieces The Crossing commissioned from Kile, 2009′s Where flames a word, for our Celan Project, and 2011′s The Waking Sun for our Seneca Sounds Project.”
Donald and I will briefly discuss the music. But it’s mostly the music.
“…Meanwhile, the group has an impressive new recording out, It is Time (Navona Records NV5845), with works by David Shapiro, Kile Smith, Paul Fowler, Frank Havrøy, Erhard Karkoschka and Kirsten Broberg. This superb program, most of which uses texts by Paul Celan (except for Fowler’s gorgeous Breath, by Philip Levine), shows off the group’s impeccable tuning, rhythmic accuracy and shimmering texture. Shapiro’s title piece makes a blazing opening, but the album is almost worth getting just for the arresting final chord of Broberg’s Breathturn that ends it all. The immaculate sound is by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Online, who regularly records the ensemble in the Chestnut Hill church’s pristine acoustic.”
Where Flames a Word appears here, the work this wonderful new-music choir commissioned from me two years ago, setting three works of Paul Celan.
I share the disc with extraordinary pieces by Paul Fowler, David Shapiro, Kirsten Broberg, Frank Havrøy, and Erhard Karkoschka, all using words of Celan and Philip Levine, and all pushing The Crossing’s artistry to places I wouldn’t have thought of.
It was a joy to sit in and be an extra pair of ears at the recording sessions last summer, and I realize now even more how virtuosic these singers are. The technical prowess is unmistakable, but their love for the music was just as powerful, even through the long hours of taping. I remembered this from Vespers, but it was particularly noticeable on this all-unaccompanied CD, their first solo release.
As always, Donald Nally’s directing is organic and riveting. His love (that word again) for the music, the words, the singers seems all-encompassing. It was ear-opening, during the sessions, to hear what he could hear.
I think a lot of people are going to have their heads knocked off by what The Crossing does. Thrilling it is to be a part of it.
The Crossing’s premiere of Where flames a word last year received such great feedback that they’re singing it again this Saturday. My setting of Paul Celan texts will be on their Month of Moderns (MOM III) season finale, Saturday July 17th, 2010. It’s at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill at 8 pm.
The very next week, we’ll be recording this and the other Celan Project commissions, for a release on Navona Records. The NEA has funded this with a matching grant, so if you’d like to contribute toward the match, there’s more information here. Just heard their MOM II concert of Kamran Ince, Francis Pott, Lansing McLoskey, James MacMillan, and Gabriel Jackson, and they’re astounding as ever. Looking forward to Saturday night, which includes their Levine Project commission of a new Paul Fowler work.
Donald Nally’s choir, The Crossing, occupies a unique niche in the musical ecosystem: Its singers perform new and unfamiliar music for a small chamber choir. I heard them for the first time last season, when they joined Piffaro for a major event: the premiere of Kile Smith’s Vespers for voice and Renaissance instruments. The Crossing’s latest a capella concert in Chestnut Hill was the first pure Crossing concert I’ve attended, and it met most of my expectations. The Crossing presents novel, beautiful, complex music that requires precise coordination and first-class voices.
The program’s main event was another premiere by Kile Smith, the final work in a trilogy Nally has dubbed the Celan Project: three settings for texts by Paul Celan (1920-1970), a Romanian Jewish poet who survived the Nazi death camps.
I’d never heard of Celan, and I found the texts obscure and complex. Celan grew up in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, speaking several languages, including Yiddish. But German was the language used by cultured Central Europeans in his youth, and he continued to write in it after the Holocaust, even though it was the language of his oppressors. Celan’s German is so personal and inventive that Smith referred to him as the “German James Joyce” when I queried him after the concert.
Smith’s piece used English translations, which only increased their opaqueness in my case, and I listened to his piece primarily as pure, wordless music. Smith treated the unaccompanied voices just as unpredictably—and effectively—as he treated Renaissance instruments in the Vespers and modern instruments in the horn concerto he wrote for the Classical Symphony. He’s composed a number of good pieces over the years, but lately he seems to be on a roll.
For unaccompanied mixed chorus, commissioned by The Crossing, Donald Nally, Music Director. Premiere, the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 5 Jun 2009, 8 pm. The Crossing will also perform this at the Chorus America 2009 Conference Opening Concert, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 313 Pine St., Philadelphia, 10 Jun 2009, 7:30 pm.
1. Before your late face
Before your late face,
a loner
wandering between
nights that change me too,
something came to stand,
which was with us once already, un-
touched by thoughts.
2. Conversation in the Mountains
And it was quiet in the mountains where they walked, one and the other.
“You’ve come a long way, have come all the way here…”
“I have. I’ve come, like you.”
“I know.”
“You know. You know and see: The earth folded up here, folded once and twice and three times, and opened up in the middle, and in the middle there is water, and the water is green, and the green is white, and the white comes from even farther up, from the glaciers, and one could say, but one shouldn’t, that this is the language that counts here, the green with the white in it, a language not for you and not for me—because, I ask you, for whom is it meant, the earth, not for you, I say, is it meant, and not for me—a language, well, without I and without You nothing but He, nothing but It, you understand, and She, nothing but that.”
“I understand, I do. After all, I’ve come a long way, I’ve come like you.”
“I know.”
3. I know you, you are the deeply bowed
(I know you, you are the deeply bowed,
I the transpierced, am subject to you.
Where flames a word, would testify for us both?
You—all, all real. I—all delusion.)
Before your late face, page 5. View excerpt Conversation in the Mountains, page 13. View excerpt I know you, you are the deeply bowed, page 23. View excerpt
Donald Nally was on the radio Friday, May 15th, on Marty Moss-Coane’s Radio Times on WHYY, talking about The Crossing’s Month of Moderns series. That project includes settings of Paul Celan texts by me and others. Here’s the podcast; Donald’s on Hour 2 and Vespers comes in at about 37 minutes in or so. From it they play part of Psalms 70 and 113 (at about 47 minutes), and the show signs off with some of the Magnificat. It sounds like it’s from the premiere, not from the CD? Not sure; hard for me to tell from the podcast and I don’t have it turned up very loud. A wonderful interview with a fully engaged artist, and very enlightening about what makes The Crossing what they are. Which is very…very…good. They’re singing my new piece, Where flames a word, on June 5th. Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles last night (wow), then Kirsten Broberg and Bo Holten et al. this Friday May 22nd, Bo Holten again on the June 5th concert, more later…
Live performances of Vespers, The Waking Sun, and Where Flames a Word will be on the radio this weekend:
