The fun never ends — fun, that is, of a singular kind.
Having just mounted a substantial Month of Moderns Festival, the Crossing choir and its leader, Donald Nally, offered a free postscript concert Tuesday — a collaborative program, roughly 90 minutes with no intermission, with the touring Norwegian Girl Choir at Christ Church in Old City.
Neither organization is the sort to take it easy in the summer heat. In his international explorations, Nally unveiled important works by seldom-heard Norwegian composers Alfred Janson and Asbjorn Schaathun. Under the direction of Anne Karin Sundal-Ask, the Norwegians (officially known as Det Norske Jentekor) had their own mixture of new works and unusually substantial folk song arrangements. Only days before, on June 30 at a United Nations concert, the group had been asked to omit a recently written piece by composer Maja Ratkje that contained texts disparaging a number of world leaders (George W. Bush said to be among them). That piece was not scheduled for Philadelphia, but the incident says much about the group, which obviously doesn't exist only to sing extremely well (which it does); it also functions as an artistic entity that does more than maintain the status quo.
