Carnegie Hall

The Crossing is a Grammy-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, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Beth Morrison Projects, Allora & Calzadilla, Bang on a Can, Klockriketeatern, and International Contemporary Ensemble. Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of the 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, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Cleveland Museum of Art, Menil Collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Haarlem Choral Biennale, Finnish National Opera, Kennedy Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Symphony Space, 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 released 28 albums, receiving two Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018 and 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 expanded its choral presentation to film, working with Four/Ten Media, sound designer Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services, visual artists Brett Snodgrass, Eric Southern, and Steven Bradshaw, and composers David Lang, Paul Fowler, and Michael Gordon on live and animated versions of new and existing works. Lang’s protect yourself from infection and in nature were specifically designed to be performed within the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which The Crossing premiered a number of newly commissioned works for outdoors by Matana Roberts, Wang Lu, and Ayanna Woods.

Donald Nally collaborates with creative artists, leading orchestras, and art museums to make new works for choir that address social and environmental issues. He has served as chorus master at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and Spoleto Festival in Italy. His 72-chapter pandemic-time series Rising w/ The Crossing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR’s Performance Today; it is archived by the Library of Congress as a cultural artifact. The 2022–2023 season includes collaborations with the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Ventura Music Festival, November Music in The Netherlands, Baltic Sea Festival in Sweden, and TBA21 in Spain. Mr. Nally is the John W. Beattie Chair of Music and professor of choral studies at Northwestern University.

Describing cellist, producer, and multifaceted artist Maya Beiser, The New York Times writes, “The adventurous Ms. Beiser has been called the ‘cello goddess,’ which is not hyperbole: She summons from her instrument an emotional power so stirring that even the most stoic audience members risk turning into sobbing sacks of flesh.” Passionately forging her artistic path through uncharted territories, Ms. Beiser has been captivating audiences worldwide, bringing a bold and unorthodox presence to contemporary classical music, reimagining solo cello performance in the mainstream arena, and defying conventional norms with her boundary-crossing performances. Hailed as “the reigning queen of avant-garde cello” by The Washington Post, she has been called a “cello rock star” by Rolling Stone and praised as “a force of nature” by The Boston Globe.

Raised on a commune in Israel’s Galilee Mountains by her Argentinean father and French mother, Ms. Beiser spent her early life surrounded by the music and rituals of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, while studying classical cello repertoire. Throughout her extensive career, she has been a featured performer on the world’s greatest stages among them Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Southbank Centre, Royal Albert Hall, Barbican Centre, and Sydney Opera House. Among the wide range of artists with whom she has collaborated are Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Tan Dun, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Shirin Neshat, Erin Cressida Wilson, Bill Morrison, Robert Woodruff, Missy Mazzoli, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Evan Ziporyn, Pontus Lidberg, Wendy Whelan, Lucinda Childs, and Joe Hisaishi.

Ms. Beiser’s vast discography includes 14 solo albums, many of them topping the classical music charts. She is the featured soloist on numerous film soundtracks, including an extensive collaboration with composer James Newton Howard for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and After Earth, Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters, Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond, and Rupert Sanders’s Snow White and the Huntsman. Her performance of David Lang’s world to come has been featured on the soundtrack for Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning film La Grande Bellezza.

Ms. Beiser is a United States Artists Distinguished Fellow in Music and was a Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology. Her TED Talk has been watched by millions, and she’s been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts and All Things Considered, PBS NewsHour, and BBC World News. She is a graduate of Yale University.

Laurie Olinder is a multimedia designer, painter, textile designer, and photographer. She has designed projections for many composers and theater artists, including John Adams, Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Gavin Bryars, Michael Gordon, Henryk Górecki, David Lang, Maya Beiser, and Julia Wolfe. Recent projection design and video projects include Vaya Vaya with vocalist Mahsa Vahdat and Kronos Quartet, Simone Dinnerstein’s The Eye Is the First Circle, and Wick Simmons’s Exquisite Drones with composers inti figgis-vizueta, Conrad Tao, and Jack McGuire. Other collaborations include Rachel J. Peters’s Companionship, Nkeiru Okoye’s Briar Patch, Elysian Fields’s Transience of Life, Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic (Big Ears Festival), Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Silent Cranes, Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Bubbles, David Lang’s the difficulty of crossing a field, Michael Gordon’s Lightning at our feet (Brooklyn Academy of Music), and John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. Ms. Olinder is a founding member of New York’s Ridge Theater. She has been recognized with an Obie Award, a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, an Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Design in the Theater, and a NYFA Fellowship.

Eric Southern is a lighting designer who works in theater, opera, music, and dance. At Carnegie Hall, he designed the lighting for Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister and With a blue dress on, Michael Gordon’s Weather One, and David Lang’s mystery sonatas. Under the direction of David Lang, Mr. Southern provided a live lighting score to John Cage’s Fontana Mix. Recently, he provided lighting and set designs for The Crossing on a new staging of The Knee Plays by Philip Glass and David Byrne. Mr. Southern is a longtime collaborator of the award-winning 600 HIGHWAYMEN theater group. Internationally, his designs have been seen in London at the Menier Chocolate Factory, in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and at Parc de la Villette, and at Opéra d’Avignon, as well as in South Korea, Greece, Australia, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary. In the US, his work has been seen at Lincoln Center, Goodman Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Kennedy Center, Atlantic Theater Company, Harris Theater, Guthrie Theater, Virginia Opera, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, among others. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University and is currently an assistant professor at Northwestern University.