The Crossing presents Month of Moderns 2

This June 28 offering, titled The People Speak from the Birthplace of America (Philadelphia Composers Ask Questions), featured previous commissions from The Crossing’s deep canon of over 200 choral works. Highlighted composers were Jennifer Higdon, Kile Smith, Robert Maggio, Julia Wolfe, James Primosch, Kevin Vondrak, and Benjamin C.S. Boyle—Philadelphians all—along with a work by Natalia Tsupryk and the world premiere of Virtues by Nathalie Joachim.

Melodic threads

The concert opened with a cello solo by Thomas Mesa, renowned regional favorite and long-time collaborator, who played short interstitial interludes between each choral selection. Composed by Nally and based in music written by Curtis alum Samuel Barber, they felt improvisatory and allowed the two-act concert to flow without interruption. Mesa, featured as well in both Joachim’s and Tsupryk’s works, played throughout with his trademark passion, grace, and eloquence.

Of the program’s eleven works, three were by Kile Smith from his full-length The Arc in the Sky, the fine song cycle that premiered in 2018 with texts by poet Robert Lax (1915-2000). “Why did they all shout” opened the concert with a paean to the jubilant music of Louis Armstrong. “There are not many songs” is a jazzy work filled with blue-note chords and a gorgeous melody carried by the altos. And the concert’s penultimate work was Smith’s haunting “Jerusalem”. The composer weaves the title word throughout the piece, passing it around like a melodic thread, with its aching refrain (“lovely, ruined Jerusalem”) repeated over a dozen times.

Higdon, Tsupryk, and Shapiro

Next on the program was Jennifer Higdon’s The Absence, Remember, which melded two poems: “Around the Absence of Bluestem” by Athena Kildegaard and “May 1915” by Charlotte Mew. In this textually dense piece, Higdon respected the flow of the poets’ words, setting them congruently rather than fragmenting them, and the work’s sections, including its ending, were filled with beautiful harmonic resolutions.

Kevin Vondrak gave Kyiv by Ukrainian composer and violinist Tsupryk a wordless choral arrangement. The work has no score, existing only in electronic form, and Vondrak transcribed its cinematic sound world to feature Mesa with supporting singers. Tsupryk (who also writes for film and TV) bases much of her work on Russia’s ongoing war with her country, and Vondrak crafted the haunting chorus part to evoke the (imperceptible at first) droning of the air raid sirens that the composer employed.

Before intermission was Death: The Lucky Ones by David Shapiro. This many-layered work opens with the singers building gorgeous sound clouds that move in and out of fugal and antiphonal passages, sometimes resolving in a chord and then scattering. Its text by noted British biologist and author Richard Dawkins was from his 1998 work Unweaving the Rainbow, which states that “we are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” the work’s concluding phrase.

Virtues and a Hurricane

After intermission came the concert’s new commission, the world premiere of Nathalie Joachim’s Virtues, composed for the ensemble and Mesa. Grammy-nominated Joachim, who was Opera Philadelphia’s 2025-26 composer-in-residence, set one of Benjamin Franklin’s most compelling and shortest works. Written when he was a young man, The Thirteen Necessary Virtues lists the tenets by which Franklin planned to strive toward “moral perfection”. Quoting each virtue, Joachim begins the work with a chorale-like structure that quickly dissolves into staccato, incantatory moments. As the piece progresses, she interweaves the tenets, mixing up their order and ending the work in an energetic dissonance that mirrors the fact that like all of us, Franklin was not always successful in achieving his moral goals.

Next was Hurricane, an interesting work with music by Julia Wolfe and words from multimedia artist Suzanne Bocanegra that describes how to survive a hurricane and what to do in its aftermath. It begins with an insistent hand-drum which the chorus gradually joins and is filled with sliding vocals reminiscent of whistling winds and warning sirens. Mesmeric in its impact, Hurricane was actually a preview of a four-movement film installation by Bocanegra, with music by Wolfe and others and featuring The Crossing, that will run at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum in the fall.

Boyle, Democracy, and FDR

The concert’s vocal riches also included Benjamin C.S. Boyle’s eloquent Empire of Crystal (with text by Italian writer Italo Calvino) and a macaronic Gloria by James Primrosch (with words by poet Denise Lavertov and Latin Mass texts). And it concluded with Democracy by Robert Maggio, with text from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1940 radio broadcast where he stated, “My friends … I would ask no one to defend a democracy which in turn would not defend everyone in the nation.” Nally purposefully set this political text as the concert’s final message.

This performance of Democracy was not a formal premiere—the 2020 work was sung during the pandemic with singers outdoors, isolated from one another in a field—but this was the first time Maggio heard it in a concert setting. He set Roosevelt’s words clearly, using “my friends” as a choral refrain throughout and periodically foregrounding soloists. The work ends with anthemic chords rallying the country to become “the great arsenal of democracy.” But leaving the future uncertain, it ends with the sopranos fading away, intoning al niente “we must be …”

A remarkable ensemble

It was a joy to once again hear the clarity, sonority, and depth of Nally’s remarkable ensemble. Their concerts require that the (appreciative) audience be fully committed to the density of both the often-challenging music and its texts, following the intricate words in a printed program or in clear and prominently projected supertitles. This repertoire was also heard several days earlier at Broad Street Love, and the Month of Moderns was presented this year as part of ArtPhilly’s What Now: 2026 Festival, and on June 30 The Crossing will announce their 2026-27 season.

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