Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Meehan: Abraham's Way; Fairouz: Poems and Prayers

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Ash Wednesday, March 2nd marks the beginning of the forty-day penitential period of Lent in the traditional Christian calendar. In oldtime Catholic Europe (and in Protestant lands, too) the opera houses closed for the duration, and unstaged sacred oratorio replaced opera until after Easter. Following that tradition, lyric theater programming for this month switches over to oratorio and other sacred vocal music drawn mostly from Judeo-Christian classical music culture.

On this first Lenten Sunday I feature an absolutely unique recording of a contemporary oratorio and give it its world premiere broadcast on WWUH. Rob Meehan (b. 1951) was a classical music broadcaster on WWUH back in the 1970's. This local guy has gone on to compose electronic music. For several years he has been perfecting his magnum opus, an electronic oratorio Abraham's Way (2017-21). It is entirely possible in electronic music technique to generate human singing voices and program them to sing in whatever language is required, both in chorus or solo capacity, and recreate the sounds of acoustic instruments, too. Rob Meehan prepared his own libretto for Abraham's Way, drawing upon ancient holy texts in Latin and Arabic, with English language quotations from the Bible and the verse of various modern poets, among them William Wordsworth. The conclusion of this musical meditation on the old religions, so says Rob Meehan: "Love is all there is." Rob Meehan's Abraham's Way is broadcast on compact discs I obtained from the composer himself. The oratorio will soon be available for audition on YouTube.

There's time remaining for more contemporary vocal music sung in Arabic and Hebrew. New York City-based composer Mohammed Fairouz (b. 1985) has Arabic roots. He has composed an oratorio, Zabur ("Book of Psalms," 2013), which received its world premiere recording through the Naxos record label. You'll get to hear his Symphony No.3 ("Poems and Prayers," 2013), which is also oratorio-like and is scored for orchestra and chorus, with mezzo and baritone soloists. "Poems and Prayers" could be considered a "Symphony of Psalms," like the famous Stravinsky work. With its bilingual text, it is overall a prayer for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. The world premiere recording of "Poems and Prayers" was made in Royce Hall, Los Angeles, with Neal Stulberg conducting the UCLA Philharmonia, the UCLA Chorale, and UCLA University Chorus. The West Coast premiere of this work was recorded live in performance. A 2014 Sono Luminus compact disc release.