Superb singing and a suite of first-class contemporary compositions define BORN, a new recording from the professional chamber choir The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally. Every solo voice shimmers and shines, while the group's block chords blend wonderfully. As a collection of performances, this album is hard to beat.

This excellence gives us the luxury of talking about the music, and it is here where there might have been room for improvement. Born the song, the title track composed by Michael Gilbertson, is the weakest on the album, nearly ten minutes of atmospheric waiting around for the good stuff to start. There's nothing wrong with it. There's just nothing compelling either. It sounds straight out of the Whitacre-Tavener-Pärt school of shimmery reincarnated early music. If it had come at the end of the album, I'd probaby be writing about how it allowed us to float out in a good mood, but right off the bat means I just want to skip ahead.

Edie Hill's Spectral Spirits suite is a tour de force and absolutely worth your investment. As a song cycle, it is compelling, varied, and dramatic. As a performance, it's fantastic. Soloists Maren Montalbano and Rebecca Myers blow me away, and their male counterparts James Reese and Dominic German do not let the side down. The interplay between solo and choral work and the heartbreaking storytelling — eyewitness reports of birds that have been driven extinct in North America — is downright gripping. German's retelling of Spectral Spirits: XI. Eyewitness: Mr. Wilson and the Ivory-bill almost brings me to tears, as does the phenomenal swooping majesty of Spectral Spirits: VII. Carolina Parakeet. To think these parakeets once covered the east coast in clouds and that humans extinguished them is paralyzing. As the group sings of the 19th century Eskimo Curlew, whose descendants have not been seen alive since the 1980s, thousands of birds were killed per year.

Myers' soprano recounts Spectral Spirits: VIII. Eyewitness: Lucinen M. Turner and the Migration of the Curlews with a grace that recalls the mystical melismas of Hildegard von Bingen. Montalbano's mezzo frames many of the choral pieces with short namings of the birds in question, a recitative that has its own beauty while advancing the narrative. Hill's pieces hang together without repeating themselves and as a collection are truly marvelous. (They also make a great pairing with soprano Deborah Sternberg's recent award-winning collection of newly composed avian art songs, Birds of Love and Prey.)

The Crossing's album closes with a pair of works by Gilbertson that, to me, would have been better choices for the front bookend even if they are longer than Born itself. The compositions are more interesting and would have led more naturally into the Spectral Spirits suite. Perhaps I'll frame it that way when I come back to this album, which I will, again and again. If you're interested in contemporary classical vocal music, this is a must-add to your streams.

BORN is the latest album by The Crossing, a GRAMMY-winning professional chamber ensemble conducted by Donald Nally. The group states that The Crossing "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." The album features original works from composers Michael Gilbertson and Edie Hill, all of it recorded here for the very first time. This is an album that no fan of The Crossing will want to be without, not only for these awe-inspiring original pieces, but because of the breathtaking quality of the performances.

Born.
So he was born, too.
Born like everyone else.
Like me, who will die.

The album begins with our title track, Born, composed by Gilbertson and based on No End of Fun by Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Wisława Szymborska. Written in 8 parts throughout, the music is deeply complex, both harmonically and emotionally. The instances of sustained dissonances, first between altos and tenors, and then between sopranos, serves as an undercurrent to the more homophonic, chordal excerpts. The tone quality and intonation that The Crossing brings to the music is truly phenomenal.

Take note. These birds are still singing to us. We must listen.

Spectral Spirits, composed by Hill, is based around four poems by Holly Hughes from her book Passings — Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, Eskimo Curlew, and Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. A 30-minute concert work of art written in 13 movements for 24 voices, Spectral Spirits takes listeners on a journey through a seemingly endless palette of vocal colors and textures that will leave you utterly speechless. The expressive depth of the performance is remarkable, from the soaring intensity of the Passenger Pigeon to the gentle intimacy of the Eskimo Curlew and the piercing, profound nature of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. Spectral Spirits is an inventive and mind-bending choral work that demands multiple listens.

For a moment
my silence
became my reign

BORN concludes with another dazzling original by Gilbertson, with text by Kai Hoffman-Krull. Returning explores the story of David and Jonathan from the Hebrew Bible. Divided into two parts, What knits us and I thought of staying quiet, Returning is the definition of passionate and disciplined choral singing. The combination of Gilbertson's rich harmonic language with Nally's expert conducting and musical direction places Returning among some of my absolute favorite choral music of all time. The Crossing and Donald Nally continue to show themselves as powerful advocates for new music in the contemporary choral repertoire.

Classical choral ensemble The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, is known for commissioning new works. The group's new album, BORN, features three such commissions: two composed by Michael Gilbertson — the titular work and Returning, that bookend the album — and Spectral Spirits by Edie Hill. The performances of these emotionally and tonally complex pieces display the ensemble's musical flexibility as well as the difficulties of conveying poems through singing.

Gilbertson contributes two works set to melancholy, provocative poems. The first, Born, describes someone grappling with mortality after their partner's mother's death using wolf imagery. In contrast, Returning sets an unspoken conversation between Biblical characters David and Jonathan on the eve of battle, imagining the two as romantic partners. The ensemble is separated into three "voices": David (sung by lower parts), Jonathan (sung by upper parts), and a third (all voices) commenting on love in the abstract. It is definitely worth listening to Returning with the liner notes for this work to make sense of which character is singing what, especially because the strict voice part separation between David and Jonathan disappears part-way through Part 2.

Both of Gilbertson's works feature a lot of short, clipped phrasing, which conveys the halting nature of grief but also impedes the ensemble from creating much forward or dynamic motion. Even so, The Crossing showcases its impeccable tuning of an array of lush, dense chords and finely honed blend on these tracks. However, the group's diction on consonants is lacking on these two works, so the liner notes are very necessary to understand the words. Otherwise, the listener hears walls of expressive chords but has little idea what they are expressing.

Hill's multi-movement work Spectral Spirits sets vivid observations about now-extinct bird species by a variety of poets including Henry Thoreau. She intersperses the choral passages, set to striking poems by Holly J. Hughes, with short solos that are sung superbly by baritone Dominic German, alto Maren Montalbano, and soprano Rebecca Myers. The group's diction improves on these tracks, which helps the listener to hear the contrasting characterizations of these birds in composition and words (though I would recommend still reading along with the liner notes while listening). For example, in my favorite movement from the work, we learn that the Carolina Parakeet moved in fast swoops. The Eskimo Curlew, however, glided and was fiercely loyal. The work ends with a haunting final chord on the phrase, "perhaps it's not too late to save them, to save us all."