Weekend features music with Jewish theme
By ALAN SMASON
Music notes wafting through the aether this weekend will carry with them special ties and significance to the Jewish community. Saturday night two competing concerts will be held. The first is Loyola University’s presentation of Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio “Elijah,” based on the legend of the biblical prophet, at Temple Sinai, 6227 St. Charles Avenue. The second is the initial presentation of the Louis Moreau Institute, a non-profit classical music arts organization largely run by Jewish members, which is named for 19th Century Jewish American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
Cantor Joel Colman, left, seen here at last week’s JCRS fundraiser, will be featured in “Elijah” tomorrow night at Temple Sinai. (Photo by Alan Smason)
“Elijah,” the massive work of approximately 150 singers and musicians is the vision of Meg Frazier, the Loyola Music Department professor, who will conduct members of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra as well as the Loyola University Chorus and Chamber Singers. Opera superstar and Loyola alumnus Alfred Walker will be heard in the title role along with Loyola faculty members, Luretta Bybee, Tyler Smith and Betsy Uschkrat.
Temple Sinai Cantor Joel Colman will be featured in the quartet “Cast Thy Burden Upon the Lord.” Organist Marcus St. Julien, who regularly plays on Sundays further up the avenue at Rayne Memorial United Methodist Church, will be accompanying the singers and musicians on the huge Temple Sinai pipe organ.
Frazier claims the reason for the concert has everything to do with Walker, who along with Sarah Jane McMahon has proved to be one of the more important operatic voices to emerge from Loyola University in the past two decades.
When Walker was at Loyola University last year for a program of works by Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, Frazier overheard him discussing his availability. She questioned if he had ever tackled the role before and when he told her he had some time back, she immediately began to investigate the possibilities of mounting what is considered the second most popular oratorio in all of the classical music genre. “He’s never sung it here,” she was quick to note.
New Orleans native and distinguished composition professor Morris Rosenzweig.
Although an oratorio is operatic in nature, it does possess liturgical elements and so it is clearly not an opera. “But,” says Frazier, “it runs along the lines of opera with subjects of loss of faith and redemption. Those are totally operatic subject matters.”
Meanwhile, the Louis Moreau Institute (LMI) will be preparing to hold the first of two concerts in the area at the Marigny Opera House, 725 St. Ferdinand, also at 7:30 p.m.
The two concerts are being presented by LMI founder and composer, Morris Rosenzweig,a New Orleans native and distinguished professor at the University of Utah. Rosenzweig serves as director, while local artist and longtime friend Alan Gerson is associate director. In addition, other local community members Seth Harris and wife Julie Schwam Harris also serve on the board.
The monies raised by LMI are going towards promoting new artists and new classical music. The second concert will be held at Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center, 1618 Oretha Castle Haley on Monday, March 16.
For complete information on artists and on the works being presented, click here.
