The Crossing presents ‘The Crossing at Christmas’

The December 14 concert featured a new, though uncompleted, work — Gavin Bryars’s A Native Hill, its 12-movement texts drawn from Wendell Berry’s 1968 Hudson Review essay. Berry is a Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist, and conservationist who (to wide acclaim and admiration) has tilled his land and told its story for fifty years.

Five plus five

Bryars’s five-year association with The Crossing includes The Fifth Century (a 2018 Grammy Award winner), and Native Hill is his gift to the ensemble. It was unfinished as of this performance — the work will now be premiered and recorded in June 2019 — so Nally had to reprogram quickly. He thus presented Bryars’s first five completed movements, along with five shorter works that also reference the natural world.

In the imposing sacred space filled with votive candles, the concert began with mysterious and barely audible sounds (revealed to be a marimba) that increased in volume as 24 white-gloved singers ever so slowly processed. They were holding fir branches — aloft or cradled — and led by a single candle-bearer.

The ensemble wore street clothes, not concert attire, further linking the evening with Berry’s straightforward worldview and deceptive simplicity. But there is nothing simple about the work of The Crossing or the music that this highly praised group performs.

Poems and essays in music

All that music was by living composers (with Bryars in attendance), and texts were (as always) of the highest artistry. Concert highlights included two works by Judith Weir. The program opener, “Vertue,” was her setting of a poem by George Herbert, a British metaphysical poet (a term coined by Samuel Johnson). A contemporary in time and texture of John Donne, Herbert says everything disappears except “a sweet and virtuous soul.” Weir’s close harmonies rise and fall to echo the poet’s mantra: “and all must die.”

She also wrote a dramatic setting of e.e. cummings’s “a blue true dream of sky.” The poem famously begins with “i thank you God for this most amazing day” and ends with “now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.” The most animated piece on the program, it featured dynamic choral writing led by daunting solo soprano passages (impeccably sung by Rebecca Siler) and lovely duet work (Julie Bishop and Gabrielle Barkidjija).

The centerpiece of the evening was the five movements of Bryars’s forthcoming full-length work. Since Native Hill is an essay, the text is entirely prose, its long passages almost asking to be spoken. Berry is a philosopher who peers into nature (akin to Thoreau), so in setting this exploratory work, Bryars gave himself a formidable challenge.

Natural distillations

As music is distilled sound, poetry is distilled words, so they make natural companions. The essayist, on the other hand, often leads the reader through a process, either to a conclusion or toward further exploration. Utilizing large swaths of Berry’s elegant but introspective prose sets up a contradiction. This is not a finished work, and the scope of the piece can’t be posited from hearing only its first half. But its one-dimensional aspects and lulling sameness (except in “The Path,” its second movement) sometimes dampen the textual richness.

The concert ended with Joanne Metcalf’s “Shining Light,” sung by the women while the men exited as slowly and deliberately as they entered. Nally’s ensemble performed the evening without intermission (now its custom) and with welcome subtitles projected against the church’s striking Nativity triptych (a visual not connected with any of the texts).

The ensemble performed with a serious mien purposely antithetical to many holiday offerings. It was an intellectually rich evening and the ensemble sang, as always, to perfection. But the somber performance and its inward-looking pace made for a muted experience. Of course, this evening was a change from what was originally programmed. Still, perhaps a less overpowering space would distill this performance into the emotional evening Nally had clearly planned.