Donald Nally’s much vaunted 24-member chamber choir The Crossing gave a program of three New York premieres at Zankel Hall, one dense and modernist, one weighty and substantial, and one appealingly sentimental, but all making impressive, intriguing use of the choir’s textural possibilities.
The substantial work was Tania León’s Singsong, a five-movement setting of razor-sharp texts by Rita Dove that weighed in at over 45 minutes. The texts were only sporadically intelligible, often overlapping themselves in León’s settings. Projected on the back wall of the hall, they functioned more as epigraphs for the musical textures. These were sometimes playful, approximating the sound of a pizzicato string section; somber, elegiac and homophonic; or spiky, angular and disjointed. León is a master at incorporating references without quoting; I caught the echoes of blues, hymns and hip-hop at various points without ever leaving the piece’s own sound world.
Singsong is really a duet for chamber choir and flutes, with superstar new-music flutist Claire Chase playing alto and bass flutes as well as the familiar C flute. The flute parts were intricately detailed. Including several extended cadenzas, they actually carried a great deal of the emotional weight of the piece, providing commentary on and distillation of the choir’s material. Chase is an extremely charismatic and physical performer too, providing a stark contrast to the restrained demeanors of the choristers. The tongue slaps, jet whistles and singing while playing that technically count as extended techniques seemed an organic part of the instrument’s sound here.
Extended vocal techniques figured almost as prominently in Wang Lu’s At Which Point, consisting of a brief wordless Prologue and two subsequent movements on texts by Forrest Gander. (The text often seemed even more incidental than in the León, although the occasional coalescence into an intelligible homophonic passage proved striking.) I heard lip trills, upward glissandi reminiscent of Shepard tones, harmonic singing and ululation at various points. At Which Point has a very modernist feel to it, with some of the dense, dissonant counterpoint recalling the heyday of the mid-20th-century serialists. But there are also inventive, nearly orchestral textures in which a tapestry of motivic fragments support individual lines of text delivered as solos or duets. The first movement’s ending, with scattered, barely audible low notes from the basses following a hair-raising dissonance, was especially memorable.
Ayanna Woods’ Infinite Body had its share of special effects – the first of the four movements opened with an arresting slow tremolo – but was more focused on the delivery of the texts, Woods’ own. She gave large portions of the first and third movements to tenor and alto soloists, respectively, allowing the words to be not only understood but delivered with real personality and affect, accompanied by non-verbal textures. Texture was an integral part of delivering the text here. The second movement, a sardonic takedown of corporate wellness lingo such as “maximize your down time”, began in a syncopated homophony but gradually devolved into contrapuntal gibberish. In the fourth, a reference to snowflakes in the text was accompanied by a canonic texture, a lovely touch.
Let us not take for granted the insanely virtuosic musical proficiency that makes a program like this possible. This is tremendously complex music to be performed unaccompanied. I saw one singer check a tuning fork at one point during the performance, which only underscores the point that everything unfolded from a single reference pitch given at the beginning of each movement. Challenging but rewarding it might be for the audience; it must be nearly as challenging for the performers.
