Some of classical music’s most revered and most played works happen to be oratorios: Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Haydn’s The Creation. For a contemporary composer writing an oratorio, the temptation might be to try to recreate what really can’t be recreated.
Pomfret composer Sarah Saul hasn’t taken that route.
Instead, she’s taken the oratorio form and given it a modern twist, interweaving rap, pop, lullaby, religious Hebrew text, Broadway musical and musical quotations from Bach to retell the story of Genesis in The First Seven Days, which will be performed on Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Universalist Church in Barnard, and Sunday at 4 p.m. at the North Universalist Chapel Society in Woodstock. Both performances are free to the public.
The oratorio features both an adult and children’s choir, and an interpretive dance choreographed by Quechee resident Peggy Brightman, who studied with two of the 20th century’s greatest modern dancers and choreographers, Merce Cunningham and Jose Limon. Brightman’s dance troupe, Moving Spirit, made up of children and adults, complements Saul’s libretto. Saul’s son Quincy Saul is the narrator; Saul herself plays the piano, which is the main musical accompaniment.
We know the Biblical story of Genesis, and the damnation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Saul looked at different Hebrew texts of the story and saw something else.
“Everyone assumed Adam and Eve are cursed, but they’re not,” Saul said during a rehearsal at the Universalist Church. Rather, she said, she interprets God’s curse as being directed at the future of the Earth.
“I see that as a very clear environmental statement,” Saul said.
Saul has fashioned the oratorio as a call to ecological arms, a plea to humans to realize that life and nature are not infinitely resilient. Saul cited the declining populations of the tiger and the orangutan, and the deforestation of Indonesia, home to one of the world’s most biodiverse tropical forests, as just a few of the alarming environmental trends that should concern us.
“It’s madness!” she said.
The oratorio “provokes you to think about the music and the text in ways you’re not used to thinking about,” said Mark Nelson, a music teacher at Crossroads Academy in Lyme who is singing in the choir, as well as assisting musical director Michael Zsoldos in leading it.
While Saul and Zsoldos rehearsed the singers, Brightman directed the dancers on the floor. Children and adults looped in and around each other, carrying puppets of a chicken, a donkey, a whale and a dragon. Nick Cohen, who plays Jehovah, sat in a chair, waiting for his next cue.
“There’s such a range of people and age and professional experience from diverging artistic backgrounds, who wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to get together,” said Zsoldos, who previously led the band at Woodstock Union High School and is now on the music faculty of the University of Vermont, Castleton State College and the Interplay Jazz Camp in Woodstock.
Saul, who has lived in Pomfret since 1985, has loved and studied music since she was a child growing up in Princeton, N.J. She taught piano at the Pomfret School for many years.
She wrote the libretto for The First Seven Days in 1994 and returned to it seven years ago, when she begin writing the music.
Her hope for the oratorio, apart from the expectation that it will entertain, is that it provokes audiences to think more fully about environmental issues.
“The best outcome I could achieve would be to raise questions,” Saul said.
The First Seven Days will be performed on Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Universalist Church in Barnard, and Sunday at 4 p.m. at the North Universalist Chapel Society in Woodstock. Both performances are free to the public.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.