The Crossing Gavin Bryars: A Native Hill 2LP

TAS Rated 4.5/5 Music, 5/5 Sonics in the May/June 2024 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Navona Records presents A Native Hill from Philadelphia's professional chamber choir, The Crossing. This monumental unaccompanied work is the result of a collaboration with composer Gavin Bryars, whose previous work for The Crossing won them their first of two recent Grammy® awards. With intimate knowledge of the individual voices and art of each singer, Bryars composed A Native Hill to capitalize on the group's unique sound, personality, and esprit de corps. A Native Hill is based on American author and environmentalist Wendell Berry's 1968 essay of the same name, which examines bucolic elements of rural life, suffused with deeper metaphysical and political implications. The 2024 album is full of rich, complex vocal textures, dense chromatic clusters, and moments of profound simplicity, offering an opportunity to reflect on life's timeless questions.

The end result is a very special choral recording. Bryars writes music that invites his listeners to pay attention to fine shading and intricate melodic structure. His marriage of sound and word is extremely precise, elegant, and thoughtful. Berry's writing has a rhythm that is very musical, which in turn inspires the subtle dynamic patterns of Bryars' composition. McNair's remastering of the original digital recording greatly enhances this experience, by adding a palpable sense of tonal depth and separation, as if you are looking into the throats of the 24 singers. Berry's own words, from the section titled The Music of Streams, captures the essence of this recording eloquently: 'There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined.