Coming Full Circle

Halfway through an early December Oberlin Orchestra rehearsal in Finney Chapel, laughter erupts from the stage after an unexpected "bang!" A clip-on light from a choir member's music folder fell from the balcony onto a timpani. The moment provides a brief moment of levity in an otherwise intense evening of music making.

Under Finney's vaulted ceilings, the orchestra, several star vocal soloists, and the conservatory's vocal ensembles-including the Oberlin College Choir, Oberlin Gospel Choir, and Oberlin Musical Union-have gathered for a final run-through of Rhiannon Giddens '00's Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Omar. Just days later, the groups would perform two sold-out concert performances-one in Finney and another at the Maltz Performing Arts Center in Cleveland.

Omar, with a libretto and music by Giddens and orchestrations by composer Michael Abels, is based on the 1831 autobiography of Omar ibn Said, a Muslim American slave who wrote mostly in Arabic of his capture and life in the U.S. The opera begins with music Giddens adapted from one of the first written transcriptions of music by a
Black musician in the New World, a piece she says was called "Coromantee." At the rehearsal, a solo viola melody danced lightly over a trudging percussive accompaniment; the roots of what would become Bluegrass are seeded into the instrument's harmonic language.

"[Omar is] a signal work of American culture," says John Kennedy '82, who conducted the opera's December performances and 2022 world premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA. "To me it's an iconic piece, like Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland and Martha Graham. I think Omar has very quickly risen to that kind of stature and will be seen that way in the decades to come."

Unlike the Spoleto premiere, the Oberlin performances of Omar were "concert opera" performances, which focus attention on the musical elements by removing or limiting other theatrical trappings of traditional opera like blocking and sets. For example, the video projections of Arabic writing that accompany a full production were condensed to a single video screen in Finney. These kinds of productions have become more common at different opera companies in the post-pandemic years for both aesthetic and budgetary reasons.