Shaw Oratorio Premiere
BERKELEY—When it came to commissioning a new piece, Philharmonia Baroque aimed for the stars: composer Caroline Shaw.
When it came to carrying it out, Shaw too aimed for the stars with her epic world premiere “Listeners,” now unveiled, played and recorded in several venues. Her uncommon secular “contempo-ratorio” draws in space travel, poetry, the UN and multiple one-world messages touching on eras and galaxies far vaster than our own. We realize we are just humble pixels in the universe’s scheme of things.
The 34-minute “Listeners” was more effective in format than in practice. This cosmic journey for the PBO orchestra and Chorale plus a pair of solo vocalists and murky vintage recordings traced the path of Voyager I, still venturing ever further away in the Milky Way, caught in the voice of the late Carl Sagan. These are interspersed with five poems ranging from 1630 to 2017 reflecting on the insignificance of human life in the cosmic view.
The musical style of Shaw, 37, is comfortable, consonant and rather English for a New Yorker. When as an Ivy League grad student she became the youngest ever to win a music Pulitzer, she got it for choral writing. So it’s no surprise that she evoked hauntingly beautiful phrases here from arguably the finest chorus in Northern California, the 23-member PBO Chorale, in the a cappella setting of Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats” poetry, as well as in the celestial epilogue of this one-world paean.
The nub of the oratorio comes with full musical forces in the highly lyrical “Maps” by Yesenia Montilla with the two strong soloists (contralto Avery Amareau, bass-baritone Dashon Burton), a wondrous orchestra in a dancing mode and a lively tattoo of drumming. And lest you forget about the baroque ensemble, the finale offers waterfall chords from the central harpsichord.
What did not work was twofold: The intelligibility of the various texts, which were impossible to follow even with printed text in hand; and the low quality vintage recordings, which were best tossed out in the future, replaced ideally by live voices.
This was the fifth Shaw work commissioned by PBO, which expects to record them in the spring.
The whole program was led by Nicholas McGegan, the 69-year-old English maestro who arrived in 1985 to lead the PBO, billed as the very first baroque orchestra in America, and he is now in his valedictorian year. In the accompanying Handelian music, especially the “Queen Anne Birthday Ode” with four vocal soloists, the music director showed his enviable animated conducting style which can make even the most soporific baroque music come vividly to life.
PHILHARMONIA BAROQUE ORCHESTRA and Chorale in world premiere of Caroline Shaw’s secular oratorio “Listeners,” plus Handel works, Oct. 17-20 at Berkeley’s First Congregational and other Bay Area venues. For PBO info: www.philharmonia.org.
