Beefore attending her astonishing Oratorio for Living Things this week, I had heard of composer Heather Christian only as one of the immortals chosen to receive a 'genius award'. They are granted to an august bunch of "extraordinarily talented and creative individuals", whose work is deemed so outstanding by an anonymous group of judges that the MacArthur Foundation gives them a stringless grant of $800,000, "as an investment in their potential". I want one. Doesn't everybody?
Now, though, I understand why she was chosen. This work, church-adjacent, is a 90-minute musical meditation on, she tells us, time, which she says is holy. I'll take her word for that as much specificity is obscured. It's also about science, ecology, non-violence and human contact, and I suspect a whole lot more that I didn't grasp as the performers sang over and under one another, not completing a thought before another begins. That almost the first third is in Latin shouldn't put you off. I don't have Latin either but was carried along by the singers, a celestial choir indeed, all twelve of them, singing together, in unison, in harmony, in counterpoint, in solos, in duets, and in perfect communion with each other and with the audience.
They have been encouraged, presumably by their director, Lee Sunday Evans, to communicate directly with the audience. It's sometimes a little unnerving to have a singer looking directly into your eyes, from a few feet away, willing you to share their thought. But they are all so personable, so approachable, that going along with them is easy.
The playing space at the Romulus Linney Theatre has been configured to be a small corridor between steep stairs with the audience sitting alongside. Thus the cast can move up and down and in and out, singing and interracting.
Christian's music, unclassifiable by genre, is beautiful and varied, played by a small orchestra placed high above the audience accompanying and sometimes countering the singers. The words, not lyrics exactly but thoughts in various languages and from a number of sources, convey their intended purpose which is to focus the audience's minds on the general, not the particular.
A libretto is provided but I didn't take advantage of it, not wanting to be reading instead of concentrating on the performance. I expect I missed a lot but, all things considered, not much I needed.