The Philadelphia Orchestra & The Crossing: Blessed Earth & Rite of Spring

• Ying Fang, soprano

John Luther Adams's Vespers of the Blessed Earth brings the audience inside the nature scenes it conjures, with musicians and singers positioned throughout the hall. "I want you to feel as though you're the center of the music, and that it’s happening all around you," the composer says. “Sort of like being out in a forest or a desert, or out in what I call the real world … where there’s something happening around you all the time.”

Adams's transformative new work is "a kind of lamentation and at the same time a celebration of the beauty of the Earth. … No matter what we do to the Earth, it just grows more beautiful." 2023 Grammy-winning Philadelphia choir The Crossing—"America's most astonishing choir" (The New York Times)—joins Yannick and the Orchestra for these groundbreaking world-premiere performances.

The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky's vivid reflection on ancient pagan rituals, still astounds more than a century after its riotous Parisian premiere and closes this incredible program.

This program will be performed March 30 and April 1-2 at Verizon Hall in Philadelphia; and March 31 at Carnegie Hall in NYC.

About The Philadelphia Orchestra

https://www.philorch.org/

About The Crossing

The Crossing is a Grammy Award-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. Many of its nearly 150 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues.

The Crossing collaborates with some of the world’s most accomplished ensembles and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Network for New Music, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Beth Morrison Projects, Allora & Calzadilla, Bang on a Can, Klockriketeatern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of world’s most prestigious venues and presenters, such as the Park Avenue Armory, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, National Sawdust, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Haarlem Choral Biennale in The Netherlands, The Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, The Kennedy Center in Washington, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space in New York, Winter Garden with WNYC, and Duke, Northwestern, Colgate, and Notre Dame Universities. The Crossing holds an annual residency at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana.

With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 27 releases, receiving two GRAMMY® Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and seven Grammy nominations. The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forum’s 2017 Champion of New Music. They were the recipients of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, and the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America.

Recently, The Crossing has expanded its choral presentation to film, working with Four/Ten Media, in-house sound designer Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services, visual artists Brett Snodgrass and Steven Bradshaw, and composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Paul Fowler on live and animated versions of new and existing works. Lang’s protect yourself from infection and in nature as well as Paul Fowler’s Obligations, based on a poem of Layli Long Soldier, were specifically created to be within the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Crossing’s pandemic response daily series, Rising w/ The Crossing, a series of 72 live performances with notes by Nally, has been archived by the Library of Congress as “an important part of the collection and the historical record.”

The Crossing is represented by Alliance Artist Management. All of its concerts are broadcast on WRTI, Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz public radio station. Learn more at www.crossingchoir.org.

About Ying Fang, soprano

https://imgartists.com/roster/ying-fang/