Coming up in Philly Fringe music: The Crossing on life and war

The director of The Crossing, Donald Nally, likes to create programs that grapple with important subjects. The Crossing’s contribution to the Fringe Festival, Nally says, “takes a look at life and war and life during war from a number of angles: national pride, grief, and anger. In Of Arms and the Man, the Crossing continues to ask complex questions for which there may be no easy answers.”

The world premiere on the program will be a specially commissioned piece by Ted Hearne, a 2018 Pulitzer finalist noted for his social advocacy. The concert will be “anchored,” Nally says, by two works by British composer Gabriel Jackson. Rigwreck was composed for The Crossing in 2013 and it takes a musical look at the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Our flags are wafting in hope and grief draws its text from a piece by Latvian poet Doris Koreva and its subject from the Latvian struggle for freedom and national identity.

The crowded program includes eight other pieces by an international roster of contemporary composers. Two of the pieces were composed for an unusual combination of three cellos and female chorus: David Lang’s depart and French composer Suzanne Giraud’s Johannisbaum. The other composers include Philadelphians Benjamin C.S. Boyle and Kile Smith (also a BSR contributor); Estonian composer Toivo Tulev (with a setting of a Walt Whitman poem); and a former artist-in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Sebastian Currier. The overall theme that binds their work, Nally says, is “how we agree or disagree across nations and continents and what we’re actually doing when we act on those alliances or arguments.”

The concert will be repeated at New York’s Park Avenue Armory on September 19 and 20. The Crossing has already added an extra New York performance because the two performances originally scheduled have sold out.

FringeArts presents Of Arms and the Man as part of the Curated Fringe on Sunday, September 16 at 5pm at FringeArts (140 N. Columbus Boulevard, Philadelphia). Tickets are $15-$39.