Edie Hill, Michael Gilbertson: Born, The Crossing / Donald Nally

Grammy’s Best Choral Performance category has historically leaned toward large cathedral and symphonic choruses singing established repertoire, Bach passions, Requiems, big Romantic-era choral-orchestral works. The Crossing, a Philadelphia-based professional chamber choir that performs only newly commissioned music, has repeatedly won that same category anyway: Born, a 2022 disc of music by Edie Hill and Michael Gilbertson released on Navona Records, took Best Choral Performance at the 2023 Grammy Awards, one of four wins in that category for the ensemble.

About the programme

Born sets music by two living American composers, Edie Hill and Michael Gilbertson, built around themes of extinction, loss, relationships and their complexities. Unlike the liturgical or historical texts that dominate much choral repertoire, the commissioned texts and music here engage directly with contemporary environmental and personal subject matter, consistent with The Crossing’s broader commissioning mission, which the ensemble describes as addressing social, environmental and political issues through newly written choral music rather than performing from the existing repertoire.

That mission-driven approach to commissioning is itself unusual for a professional chamber choir working at this level: rather than balancing commissions against a core diet of established repertoire the way most professional choirs do, The Crossing has built its entire identity, and its entire discography, around new work almost exclusively. It has released well over a dozen albums on this basis since its founding, most through smaller specialist new-music labels such as Navona and Innova rather than a major classical imprint, which makes its sustained Grammy recognition, a mainstream industry award, in a category more typically dominated by long-established institutional choirs, a genuinely unusual outcome for a commissioning-first ensemble operating largely outside the conventional classical-label system.

About the performers

The Crossing was founded in Philadelphia and has been conducted throughout by Donald Nally, who built the ensemble specifically around a commissioning model rather than a fixed repertoire of existing choral works, it has commissioned close to 200 new pieces over its history. Nally, a professor of choral studies whose own career runs alongside guest-conducting engagements with other new-music ensembles, has kept The Crossing’s singers largely consistent across the years rather than treating the choir as a revolving pool of freelance singers assembled project by project, which is part of why the group’s commissioned repertoire has developed such a distinctive, unified sound. That focus has produced an unusually consistent run of Grammy recognition for a contemporary-music specialist choir: wins for Best Choral Performance in 2018, 2019, 2023 and 2025, and eleven nominations across ten consecutive years, a record that stands out against the far larger, more institutionally established cathedral and symphonic choruses the category more typically recognises.

About the composers

Edie Hill, born in New York in 1962, studied at Bennington College under Vivian Fine before completing her graduate work at the University of Minnesota, and served as composer-in-residence at St Paul’s Schubert Club from 2005 to 2017, where she also ran a mentorship programme for young composers. Michael Gilbertson, born in 1987, is a considerably younger composer whose training runs through Juilliard and Yale; in 2018 he became one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music, one of the youngest composers ever shortlisted for the award. Pairing an established, decades-into-her-career Minnesota composer with one of the most prominent names of the following generation gives Born a real generational range within its shared subject matter, rather than presenting a single, unified compositional voice across the disc.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic, covering a real, current recording rather than reproducing a page from the site’s 1991–2018 archive, the shop closed before this disc was released. Facts about the choir’s commissioning history, the composers’ backgrounds and the award record have been independently verified.