“…it is the album’s centerpiece [Spectral Spirits] that is the major attraction. … Hill’s music evokes the bird in its particularity, and the overall effect of this is profoundly sad. It probably takes a virtuoso choir like The Crossing to do the work justice, but one may nevertheless hope that it becomes more widely performed on programs devoted to environmental themes. This is an especially strong outing from one of the most distinctive American choral ensembles.”
The chamber choir, The Crossing, specializes in close readings of texts and unusual musical settings of those texts, often involving lightly extended technique, and Born makes an ideal introduction to the work of this ensemble. As with many of the group’s recordings, this one might be described as mostly spiritual but not religious. The album takes its title from one of its two works by Michael Gilbertson that bookend the program; the second Gilbertson work is based on an imagined conversation between David and Jonathan in the Bible. Both of these are effective, but it is the album’s centerpiece that is the major attraction. Composed by Edie Hill in 2019, Spectral Spirits memorializes four extinct birds: the Carolina parakeet, the passenger pigeon, the Eskimo curlew, and the ivory-billed woodpecker. Three movements are devoted to each bird, a prose account from the bird’s own time, a brief reading of its English and Latin names, and a poem by Holly J. Hughes. Hill‘s music evokes the bird in its particularity, and the overall effect of this is profoundly sad. It probably takes a virtuoso choir like The Crossing to do the work justice, but one may nevertheless hope that it becomes more widely performed on programs devoted to environmental themes. This is an especially strong outing from one of the most distinctive American choral ensembles.