The Cave of the Patriarchs is a holy site in the West Bank where reportedly Abraham, Sarah, Jacob and some of the other Biblical patriarchs are buried. It has the distinction of being considered a holy site in Judaism, Christianity and Islam which is, I would guess, the reason Minimalist composer Steve Reich decided to write an “opera” about it. Regardless, this is exactly the kind of weird thing I love to stumble across and check out, so when I heard about this, that’s what I did.
The piece is for a small chamber orchestra and a few singers, as well as a lot of recorded audio/video taken from interviews conducted during the composition process. There are a few passages where the orchestra and singers perform musical settings of text from the Abraham narrative from the Bible and the Jewish Midrash. But the bulk of the composition features musical settings for looping snippets of audio from the interviews where various people were just asked to talk about the Abraham narrative and the characters of it and the way those things connect to their personal lives. The first act focuses on Jewish interviewees, the second act on Muslims and the third act on Christians.
It's conceptually interesting and I do really love the conceit, which Reich has used elsewhere as well, of creating melodies and motifs out of the speaking rhythms and tones of the interviewees. This always just sounds really cool to me when you hear someone speak a sentence and then the music just mimics it exactly. So there’s a lot of repetitive looping of this kind. I would say the main problem with this work is that it’s just so long. This release is two CDs and it’s almost an hour and forty-five minutes long which just wears out its welcome in my opinion. The instinct to give Jews, Muslims and Christians their own act of the opera is correct, I think, but I think each act should have been tightened up a lot and I think if this had been even a bit over an hour, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. As I said, it really is incredibly repetitive. That said, I’m glad I listened to it; it’s interesting to hear the different faiths discuss the significance of this story and this site and, like I said, I do love the musical mirroring technique with the spoken audio. That said, probably my favorite tracks were a couple of pieces that featured ambient audio recorded inside the Cave itself with a musical drone overlaid. I found those pieces kind of moving and spiritual in an interesting way; it’s an effort, after all the intellectual dialogue, to try to capture the atmosphere of a holy place and, while the piece as a whole may not be more than the sum of its parts, it’s still an admirable and intriguing effort. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – Minimalist composer takes on the Cave of the Patriarchs and the views of three major faiths surrounding it in this intriguing, if overlong, composition. 2 ½ stars.