From around the world
New work full of giant gestures
Tom Strini | The Milwaukee Sentinel | 23 April 2005
The overheated emotions, gigantic forces, monumental climaxes and grand gestures of very late Romanticism are all there, and Shohat handles these familiar elements expertly. Clearly, this young composer has prodigious command of orchestral color; you get the feeling that he knows exactly how that third trumpet part, say, fits into vast whole machinery of instrumentation around it.
More important, he knows how to handle harmony to build and to release enormous sonic and emotional tensions in a way that very few composers do these days. One of the two big ideas in this piece is a great choral, chromatic striving that surmounts one emotional summit after another. Shohat possesses the skill to give it weight and amplify its feeling with dense but beautiful harmonies.
Such harmonies stoke the boiler of the music, and they give off a lot of heat.
The contrasting big idea is a buoyant waltz, heard mainly in the orchestra. It gives the oratorio some rhythmic life and a little joy to leave the prevailing gloom. The text blended psalm and a new poetry Shin Shifrin focuses on Bathsheba’s guilt and regret when her son, Solomon, is crowned king of Israel. The ‘Song of Bathsheba’ oratorio succeeds on its own cathartic terms, the big crowd was raucously smitten with it, and Shohat’s undeniable skill can only be admired.