Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Dett: The Ordering of Moses: Primosch: Sacred Songs

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Ash Wednesday was this past March 1st, so this is the first Sunday in Lent, that forty-day penitential period in the Christian calendar leading up to Easter. In old Catholic Europe (and in Protestant European countries,too) the opera houses closed for the duration. Opera was replaced with performance of sacred oratorio. I commence my Lenten programming with an oratorio that would have been perfectly appropriate for broadcast in February in observance of Black History Month. The Ordering of Moses (1937) is the work of R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), who seems to have made history as being the first African American composer to have such a major work broadcast in its world premiere performance nationwide through the NBC radio network.

That broadcast on May 7, 1937 was preserved for posterity as recorded on acetate discs. You will hear it today as it was recorded live in performance at Carnegie Hall, New York City, May 9, 2014, and broadcast over WQXR, New York's classical station. Dett wrote his oratorio for Cincinnati's longstanding classical music May Festival. James Conlan directs the May Festival Chorus and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, with four vocal soloists. The Bridge record label issued The Ordering of Moses in 2016 on a single compact disc. Dett styled his work a "Biblical Folk Scene." It sets forth passages from the Old Testament Book of Exodus, to which Dett added some African American folkloric elements. He made use of the traditional spiritual "Go Down, Moses," with its ringing cry, "Let my people go!"

Also released through the Bridge label in 2014 are the Sacred Songs of James Primosch (b. 1956), American composer with a mystical bent. First a student, then a colleague of composers George Crumb and John Harbison, Primosch is known for his economy of style, with a subtle, articulate quality of vocal writing that is perfect for the musical setting of religious texts. In fact, he's a church musician engaged by Emmanuel Church of Boston to compose motets. His Sacred Songs were all composed between 1989 and 2008. These songs are mostly in English, but also in the German or Latin language. The settings of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke are particularly fine. The Sacred Songs are actually song cycles or cantatas for solo voice and varying small instrumental groups. The solo voices are those of soprano Susan Narucki and baritone William Sharp, accompanied by the 21st Century Consort under the direction of Christopher Kendall.