David Lang: the sense of senses. The Crossing; Donald Nally, conductor. Cantaloupe Records 713746321420. Total time: 37 minutes.
DIGITAL REVIEW — The Crossing has emerged as one of the most consistently acclaimed contemporary choral ensembles over the past two decades, earning four Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance for a body of work that places living composers at the center of its repertoire. The group’s Grammy-winning recordings The Fifth Century, Zealot Canticles, Born, and Ochre, which were among their record-breaking 11 album nominations, exemplify The Crossing’s sustained commitment to intellectually rigorous, socially engaged new music.
Under the direction of conductor Donald Nally, the Philadelphia-based ensemble has turned the usually occasional accolade of a Grammy win into a sustained pattern of recognition. So it’s no wonder that every breathing composer is knocking at its door. David Lang is one example whose 15-year relationship with this mixed-voice chamber choir has yielded significant results. On Feb. 1, Lang and the choir will await the outcome of the 2026 Grammy Awards, following the nomination of their 2025 collaboration poor hymnal.
In the meantime, Lang’s most recent collaborative release with The Crossing, the sense of senses, stands as a testament to the composer’s lifelong engagement with the sensual edge of choral music. Released in December 2025 on Cantaloupe Records, the album encapsulates Lang’s ability to blend minimalism with emotional resonance, drawing listeners into a world where reliance on repetition in text, minimal harmony, and quiet pulse offers a distinct invitation to surrender to simplicity.
The title piece, the sense of senses, immediately sets the tone for the recording: Lang’s uniquely pared-down musical language is deployed to mine the biblical Song of Songs for its vivid imagery. Rather than dramatize the erotic content of the book, Lang distills the text into an evocative series of first-person gestures that suggest rather than declare. Like Arvo Pärt, Lang shows that restraint can carry as much expressive weight as intensity or volume. Lang’s strength has always been his command of stillness and space, and it’s on elegant display here. We are immediately inside his sound world from the first track, a deceptively simple pattern for eight voices that lingers, hovers, and quietly blooms for just over eight minutes.
The voices of The Crossing carry the repeated patterns and text with vibrato-less delivery, deliberately unadorned in tone but with composed unanimity. Each phrase unfolds with enough poised energy to encourage immersive listening. The result is a performance that feels personal, as if the voices are confiding in you.
Following the opener, four pieces reinforce and expand Lang’s choral vision. “just (after song of songs)” is the album’s highlight, not simply because of the composer’s ability to hold your attention for 12 minutes with once again minimal material on pared-down text, but for the appealingly unaffected tonal quality of the female voices.
“just” introduces instrumental color, pairing voices with viola (Petula Perdikis), cello (Mimi Morris-Kim), and delicate percussion (Ted Babcock). In this setting, Lang’s fascination with a catalog-like listing of emotions adds rhythmic vitality without overwhelming the contemplative core of the music. Soft percussion — a carefully struck sound here, a lone glockenspiel pitch there — punctuate the vocal lines with restraint and subtlety.
This world echoes Lang’s well-loved The Little Match Girl Passion in its economy of means and emotional impact, a nod to his ability to condense large swaths of word into small gestures. The text is not sung emphatically, and consonants are delicately clipped with imploding articulation, offering an impressionistic, collapsing quality to the words. Any further emphasis might have reduced the text to catalogue.
Amid these sensory explorations, “sleeper’s prayer” casts a quieter, almost devotional shade. Premiered in 2016 and dedicated to Steve Reich, the piece layers a single organ line beneath the choir — a structure that evokes stillness. Where the title track and “just” immerse the listener in sensual imagery, “sleeper’s prayer” invites introspection.
The album’s textual emotional apex comes with “stateless,” a work that broadens Lang’s lens from the intimate and personal to the universal. Here, Lang juxtaposes his mother’s refugee experience in World War II-era Barcelona with the exile writings of a 13th-century rabbinic figure, Moses ben Nachman. Unlike the repeated patterns of the earlier works, “stateless” interweaves multiple vocal lines, crafting a tapestry of voices that conveys displacement, memory, and communal endurance.
When the chorus enters in unison octaves after several minutes of mosaic textures, it emerges as a profound release — a collective heartbeat emerging from fragmentation. “stateless” undercuts the mood of the album, taking it to an unnecessary and somewhat perilous detour. It does not feel ready. The instability of the delivery of the solo voices — recessed as they are in Paul Vazquez’s sound design in the awkwardly composed opening — undercut and obliterate the distinct emotional connection the music has made with the listener in the previous tracks.
Throughout the album, The Crossing delivers the scores with an intuitive embrace of Lang’s aesthetic. Their performance elevates his music from intellectual architecture to an emotive experience. Directed by Nally and assisted by associate conductor Kevin Vondrak, the ensemble demonstrates its signature control over dynamic subtleties and tuning.
the sense of senses is not a recording for rapid consumption. For listeners open to minimalism that feels human rather than austere, this release stands as a meaningful addition to the contemporary choral canon — one that reiterates Lang’s belief in music as a vehicle for connecting our physical and spiritual selves.
