On Friday evening at the Riverside Church, the Harlem Chamber Players are going big to present a seldom encountered biblical oratorio by Harlem Renaissance composer R. Nathaniel Dett.
"The Ordering of Moses" features an orchestra of 60 musicians, a choir of 75 and four soloists.
“This is the biggest, most ambitious concert we have put on to date,” said Liz Player, who co-founded the Harlem Chamber Players in 2008. The concert is being presented as part of Harlem Renaissance 100, a centennial observance.
Dett was born in 1882, the grandson of enslaved people who traveled to Canada via the Underground Railroad. His family moved back to the U.S. when Dett was a young child, and he got a degree in composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Dett taught at several colleges and was president of the National Association of Negro Musicians.
R. Nathaniel Dett, circa 1920
“He's considered a Harlem Renaissance composer,” Player said, “because he loved infusing the works of Negro spirituals into his own music.” And indeed, "The Ordering of Moses," which Dett composed in 1932, features the well-known spiritual “Go Down, Moses” as a major thematic element.
“There's something about the way that Nathaniel Dett captures the African-American diasporic cultural folk sound and the motif,” conductor Damien Sneed said. “He really sets it well, and it's really set inside of the classical orchestral sound. And he does a good job in balancing the orchestra and the chorus.”
The oratorio premiered on a national NBC Radio broadcast in 1937, but was cut off well short of its conclusion. (The network cited "previous commitments," but some historians have speculated that racist complaints were the cause.)
The work has been performed only sporadically since, according to tenor Chauncey Packer, who sings the title role of Moses. “I find it very interesting that even in the beginning breath of the piece, it was stifled and wasn't allowed to be totally free — a piece about freedom,” Packer said.
Tenor Chauncey Packer, singing the title role of Moses with the Harlem Chamber Players.
Packer says he gets chills when he thinks about his role and Dett’s personal history. “That I'm playing Moses, and that he's a direct descendant of the Black Moses, Harriet Tubman — there's equity here," Packer said. "There's huge equity.”
For Sneed, the Dett oratorio “encapsulates and it exudes almost every possible musical idiom, every possible rhythm, the textures, the color, the timbre.” He expressed hope that the piece will become “a normal part of the canon of orchestral music, the canon of choral music, and, of course, of the genre of oratorio.”
For now, with tickets priced at $25, Liz Player hopes a lot of people will discover it on Friday. “We're coming into Juneteenth, and this is about Black liberation,” she said. “Hopefully it's about freedom from this pandemic. And so I'm just hoping that people come and feel really refreshed and rejuvenated and even triumphant.”
The Harlem Chamber Players presentation of "The Ordering of Moses" will be hosted by WQXR announcer Terrance McKnight, and recorded for delayed broadcast on WQXR-FM.
