It was Nathaniel Shilkret,
a well-known Victor recording conductor,
who instigated the Genesis project.
This was to present a musical representation
of the Bible in the form of short works
from musical contributors. Since the
Los Angeles area was blessed with émigrés
and there were fees involved – and as
the project was also part of a wider
series of symposia by expatriate artists
such as Thomas Mann – volunteers were
not few in coming forward. The roster
was astonishing, starting with Schoenberg
and Stravinsky, long time opponents,
and including Toch, Milhaud, Shilkret
himself, Tansman and Castelnuovo-Tadesco.
The schema was a prelude,
Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel,
Noah’s Ark, The Covenant, and Babel.
The arch enemies Schoenberg and Stravinsky
began and ended the sequence. Schoenberg’s
Prelude is the only one without narrator.
His ordered exposition of Chaos – a
tone row naturally – employs extremes
of sonority and is made richer by his
use of a double fugue. It’s the most
concisely impressive of all the pieces,
not least because it’s the only one
that could be envisaged as having any
kind of independent life. From then
on I’m afraid things get rather sticky
and I was more than once reminded of
Delius’s comment that Parry would have
set the whole Bible to music if he’d
had time. Shilkret gives us Creation,
MGM style; actually the notes are spot-on
when they talk of a 1950s sci-fi film
score. Themes soar, the brass is noble
and rounded, the acoustic is weird and
the Narrator – there are actually five
all told and called, to be precise,
speakers – sonorously intones the biblical
text. I’m afraid I thought of Charlton
Heston.
Tansman contributes
a generic, atmosphere laden Adam and
Eve, all eleven excruciating minutes
of it. Still, he’s had one good idea,
which is to pinch some Mussorgsky and
the result is pure film music, not least
the music for serpent and the episodic
weave. I was curious to see what Milhaud
would make of Cain and Abel – all five
minutes’ worth – and it’s martial, trumpet-rich
but rather filmic; not a bad thing,
necessarily. Castelnuovo-Tadesco (Noah’s
Ark) has obviously suffered a well-known
West Coast affliction, a case of the
Franz Waxmans. This is frankly hilarious
stuff – and the composer adds to the
heightened realism by making eleven
minutes feel like the 150 days Noah
spent in the Ark. By contrast Toch uses
fugal procedure with care and his orchestration
seems warmly effusive. I say "seems"
because his orchestrations, as well
as those by Shilkret and Tansman have
had to be reconstructed by Patrick Russ.
Particularly clever is that Toch feeds
his fugue behind the interminable narrative
voices whereas the others have gone
in for generic washes of string colour.
Finally Stravinsky also uses some fugal
passages and his is the most warmly
and intelligently orchestrated, though
it’s a brief contribution.
The performances tend
to highlight the limitations of the
majority of these pieces - a rigidity
borne of Biblical text narration and
limited expressive devices. It was interesting
to read in the full and capacious notes
that an early performance was recorded
in a performance directed by Werner
Janssen. In those early performances
there was only one narrator. Here as
I said we have five speakers, male and
female, though whether this splitting
of the authorial-narrative voice is
a device to attempt inject spurious
variety or not I wouldn’t care to speculate.
It’s all done as well as it could be
but whether you’ll listen to Genesis
more than once I very, very much doubt.
One final thing; according to the stern
booklet notes the Ten Commandments aren’t
Commandments at all, which is a mistranslation
– they’re actually the ten articles
of the Sinaitic covenant. I suggest
you remember that the next time you
covet your neighbour’s ass.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review
by Rob Barnett
Tovah Feldshuh, Barbara Feldon, David Margulies,
Fritz Weaver and Isaiah Sheffer (speakers) 
