On the heels of winning their fourth Grammy Award (and 10th nomination, a contemporary record), Donald Nally and The Crossing will present the world premiere performance of Gavin Bryars’ “The Last Days of Immanual Kant” Saturday, June 14, at 7 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 8855 Germantown Ave.
Bryars, a renowned British composer, and The Crossing have an ongoing relationship that has been both collaborative and productive. Over the past several years, they have produced a major concert-length work on the writings of American novelist and …
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On the heels of winning their fourth Grammy Award (and 10th nomination, a contemporary record), Donald Nally and The Crossing will present the world premiere performance of Gavin Bryars’ “The Last Days of Immanual Kant” Saturday, June 14, at 7 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 8855 Germantown Ave.
Bryars, a renowned British composer, and The Crossing have an ongoing relationship that has been both collaborative and productive. Over the past several years, they have produced a major concert-length work on the writings of American novelist and environmental activist Wendell Berry, as well as a substantial score based on the words of British poet Thomas Traherne. That work, scored for saxophone quartet and choir, won the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.
This time around, Bryars turned his focus to the insightful, melancholy recollection of Thomas De Quincey as the English writer and essayist described the final days of Immanual Kant, the philosopher whose thoughts inspired The Crossing’s 2024-25 seasonal theme, “Transcendental Idealists.”
De Quincey wrote: “His style of conversation was popular in the highest degree and ‘un-scholastic,’ so much so, that any stranger that should have studied his works, and been unacquainted with his person, would have found it difficult to believe, that in this delightful companion, he saw the profound author of the Transcendental Philosophy.”
Bryars’ new concert-length work adds significantly to the canon of contemporary choral music. In it, The Crossing returns to the topic of aging and the observation of those who move gracefully from strength to memory loss to the inevitable.
Again quoting De Quincey: “The infirmities of age now began to steal upon Kant. One of the first signs was that he began to repeat the same stories more than once on the same day … A third sign of his decaying faculties was that he now lost all accurate measure of time. One minute, nay, without exaggeration, a much less space of time, stretched out in his apprehension of things to a wearisome duration.”
Germantown resident Donald Nally said, “This is a story of our time, of Kant’s time, of all time, a story told, in De Quincey’s words and Gavin’s music, with hope and care, patience and love. It’s a musical offering composed by an 80-year-old man about an 80-year-old man. It is a story that reminds us of our own ephemeral existence and that celebrates that very aspect of our being.”
Tickets for the Chestnut Hill performance are $40 for general admission, $30 for seniors, $20 for students, and are available at crossingchoir.org. Portions of the score will be reprised Friday, June 20, at 7 p.m., at St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Ave in New York, as part of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.
Music at the library
The Chestnut Hill Library on Germantown Ave. will host a chamber music recital Tuesday, June 17, 5:30-6:45 p.m. The performers include local musicians Ashi Sirin, Kim Dolan, Susan Schiffman, Lynn Major and Sally Livingston, performing as the Kamarady Quintet. They will be performing music by Max Bruch, Robert Schumann and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Early music on the Main Line
Lutenists Cameron Welke and Richard Stone’s duo-recital Sunday, June 1, at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont drew an encouragingly large and supportive audience and proffered exquisite renditions of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Silvius Leopold Weiss and Antonio Vivaldi. Following closely on the heels of the recital, Welke and Stone headed south to Virginia to record the three Weiss Duettos.
You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net.