From coal miners to Chelsea Manning the world of oratorios has changed – The Mercury News

Oratorio. For many of us, the word conjures large-scale works of the past, Baroque epics such as Handels Messiah and Bachs Passions.

Yet composers are reimagining the form for our times. Two contemporary works, both making their Bay Area premieres this week, demonstrate that oratorios remain a powerful medium for telling big stories.

The works themselves couldnt be more different. Ted Hearnes The Source, which San Francisco Opera presents Feb. 24-March 3, focuses on Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence analyst who released thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Julia Wolfes Anthracite Fields, coming to Cal Performances in a Feb. 26 performance featuring the new music sextet Bang on a Can All-Stars and Cappella SF, examines the Pennsylvania coal mining industry from the late 19th century on.

These new-wave oratorios, both of which premiered in 2014, use unusual forces to tell their stories.

Hearnes score employs four voices, seven instrumentalists, video and electronica; the libretto, by Mark Doten, is assembled from news reports, Twitter feeds, declassified government documents and emails between Manning and hacker Adrian Lamo. Performed in the round, the piece yields a prismatic portrait of Manning, who was arrested in 2010 as Bradley Manning and sentenced to 35 years in prison. (Manning subsequently began identifying as female: now Chelsea, her sentence was commuted by President Obama last month. She is scheduled to be released in May.)

Hearne began writing The Source in 2010 and says the piece morphed as Mannings story did. At first, I was interested in the freedom of information implications of a group like WikiLeaks, the composer explained in a recent call from Los Angeles. When the leaks of the Department of Defense and Department of State cables came out and Manning became known as a public figure, that story and the content of those leaks really took over.

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Like Hearne, Wolfe drew on historical documents for Anthracite Fields. Her score, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2015, riffs on miners names, taps interviews and oral histories and incorporates bits of ads, speeches and childrens rhymes in a moving 21st-century score (the title refers to the type of coal that burns the cleanest.)

Wolfe, a co-founder of Bang on a Can, grew up in Pennsylvania but says she knew little about the coal industry. She started taking the bus on information-gathering trips to coal country, visiting mines and museums and talking to people who were part of that life. She was often surprised by what they told her.

In one poignant movement, the choir sings the names of children the Breaker Boys who worked and perished in the mines. Other movements focus on mining communities the patch towns where workers and their families lived.

I wanted to honor the people who worked in the mines, says Wolfe. I thought this would be a dark piece there were a lot of disasters and difficulties but there were also sunny things. The work comes current in the final movement, which names activities that coal continues to power today.

Surprisingly, neither composer initially thought of these scores as oratorios.

I dont use the word oratorio very often, Hearne said, although I love the old Baroque oratorios, which have a way of telling stories that uses discrete numbers.

When you see the Messiah, youre vaguely aware of the story. Here, we know part of the story. Most people have heard of Chelsea Manning and probably know that the U.S. is engaged in war overseas. But theres no character. Its not lets follow Mary as she gives birth. There are four singers, and they all sing the words that came from several different people. They all sing Mannings words at one point. They sing words that were written by Department of Defense officials. So its really up to us to piece together the story. Thats why I call it an oratorio.

Wolfe notes that contemporary works are often harder to categorize. These names are kind of fluid, she said. Like Einstein at the Beach is it an opera? Sometimes things are called something afterwards. With this piece, I almost retroactively called it an oratorio. I really think of it as a poetic history.

Details

The Source: Feb. 24-March 3; Taube Atrium Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco; $35; 415-864-3330, http://www.sfopera.com

Anthracite Fields:7 p.m. Feb. 26, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley; $38-$62; 510-642-9988, calperformances.org

Contact Georgia Rowe at growe@pacbell.net.

Excerpt from:
From coal miners to Chelsea Manning the world of oratorios has changed - The Mercury News