“Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s land; Tell Pharaoh Let my people go!”
Download MP3Experience one of the greatest American choral works of all time, American composer Robert Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses, performed by hundreds of combined voices from the Fairfield County Chorale, Heritage Chorale of New Haven, and New Haven Chorale.
From Music Director Perry So:
“Finally after almost a century this great work is starting to receive its due. The Ordering of Moses was never forgotten – church choirs, community groups and others have kept the piece in our ears – but the first performance at Carnegie was only in 2014, and the British premiere in 2022. What remarkable sound worlds are contained in the piece: lush late-Romanticism with echoes of Wagner and Elgar, but as a context for the immediacy of the African-American spiritual that sounds stark and timeless. The sound of actual chains being pulled emanate from the orchestra against harmonies that dissolve into suggestions of near-Eastern scales. All in the service of the story and the emotion contained at the core of the work – a young Moses discovering his calling to lead his people out of slavery, perhaps the most eloquent musical cry against oppression in the American tradition.”
“Finally after almost a century this great work is starting to receive its due. The Ordering of Moses was never forgotten – church choirs, community groups and others have kept the piece in our ears – but the first performance at Carnegie was only in 2014, and the British premiere in 2022. What remarkable sound worlds are contained in the piece: lush late-Romanticism with echoes of Wagner and Elgar, but as a context for the immediacy of the African-American spiritual that sounds stark and timeless. The sound of actual chains being pulled emanate from the orchestra against harmonies that dissolve into suggestions of near-Eastern scales. All in the service of the story and the emotion contained at the core of the work – a young Moses discovering his calling to lead his people out of slavery, perhaps the most eloquent musical cry against oppression in the American tradition.”
