New York Times – The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020

NPR – Best Classical Albums for a Troubled 2020

"We really love singing together."

These are the words that came to mind when it became clear we wouldn’t be singing together in March 2020. For people who sing, this sudden isolation – a prohibition on what we ordinarily do every day to express ourselves, to gather, and to pay our rents – was a shock. Shock soon turned to frustration. Frustration quickly dissolved into grief. 

Our response to this grief was to ask how we can continue expressing and gathering, how we can hold the community together, how we can use what resources we have to rethink who we are at this moment. One of those resources is an archive of fifteen years of live concert recordings; musical moments in our history that stand out as special or loved or fun or challenging or just calm at time when calmness stands in relief against a background of chaos.

We wanted to feel like we were walking through this together, waking up and starting our day together… Rising w/ The Crossing. So, we began sharing these archived moments, each accompanied by thoughts on why we love singing together, and why we love singing that day’s music.

The first 60 chapters of Rising w/ The Crossing ran from March 16 to June 5, 2020. The series gained national attention and was featured in Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Performance Today; it has been archived by The Library of Congress as a cultural artifact as an "important part of this collection and the historical record."

On December 11, 2020 we released "Rising w/ The Crossing" as an album on New Focus Recordings. It collects 12 entries from the series and includes collaborations with International Contemporary Ensemble and rare recordings of The Crossing singing early music from Buxtehude's Membra Jesu nostri with Quicksilver Baroque, alongside newly released recordings by Ted Hearne, David Lang, Eriks Esenvalds, Santa Ratniece, Paul Fowler, and Joby Talbot. The album was met with critical acclaim and was inclueded in The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020 by the New York Times and NPR’s A Diary Of Classical Albums For A Troubled 2020.