The Crossing with Donald Nally by Charles Grove, Claire Chase by Walter Wlodarczyk

Three-time Grammy winners for Best Choral Performance, The Crossing has been called “America’s most astonishing choir” (The New York Times). In this concert, the group’s “amazing, immaculate sound, both ethereally light and almost tangibly present” is used to stunning effect in Wang Lu’s At Which Point, an arresting and delicate setting of Forrest Gander’s Pulitzer-winning grief poems. In the New York premiere of Singsong, visionary composer Tania León sets to music the hard-edged “cricket poems” of US Poet Laureate (and fellow Pulitzer winner) Rita Dove, creating a rhythmically charged dialogue between the choir’s kaleidoscopic colors and the virtuosic flute inventions of MacArthur Fellow Claire Chase. Infinite Body—by The Crossing’s first-ever resident composer, Ayana Woods—probes a series of difficult questions and arrives at a shockingly joyful conclusion.

Claire Chase returns as we revisit Rita Dove’s hard-edged, raw “cricket poems” in Tania León’s endlessly inventive Singsong, which dances its way through a journey of Black singers from pre-slavery to today. Wang Lu’s At Which Point boldly explores the fragility and emptiness of grief found in poet Forrest Gander’s world of those “left behind.” Finally, Ayanna Woods’ Infinite Body, a co-commission of Carnegie Hall and The Crossing, explores how capitalism influences our relationship to our bodies, peering through the lenses of the natural world, burnout culture, and embodiment, to observe and unsettle the notion of our separateness. 

The return of Claire Chase and the tsunami of energy that comes with her, as we revisit Rita Dove’s hard-edged, raw “cricket poems” in Tania León’s endlessly inventive Singsong, which dances its way through a journey of Black singers from pre-slavery to today. Wang Lu’s At Which Point boldly explores the fragility and emptiness of grief found in poet Forrest Gander’s world of those “left behind.” Finally, Ayanna Woods’ Infinite Body, a co-commission of Carnegie Hall and The Crossing, explores how capitalism influences our relationship to our bodies, peering through the lenses of the natural world, burnout culture, and embodiment, to observe and unsettle the notion of our separateness.