Shall We Gather at the River – Peter Sellars’ intermingling of the gospel of Bach’s cantatas and American spirituals – begins with a staged assemblage. After a prolonged darkness, the word ‘meditation’ projected above the orchestra, a sheng is heard, like a tiny church organ or a distant bagpiper. A single, bright light at the center of the ceiling shakes the room awake. The sheng grows closer, the singers and musicians onstage reposition themselves, the lights switch to blue and a feeling of ritual is firmly established. A slow sequence of images project onto a trio of screens above the stage – an Arctic mountainscape, a miner and his family, floods and forest fires – set the scene as planetary. The initial strains of Bach’s Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot (Break with hungry men thy bread) seeps through the cavernous Park Avenue Armory, in a stirring cross-fade from the introductory Chinese processional.
The Oxford Bach Soloists and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street shared the central stage with the orchestra. On a smaller stage at audience right, countertenor Reginald Mobley stood, watching. As the cantata selection concluded, Mobley sang the spiritual Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees with dancer Reggie (Reg Roc) Gray in close proximity. Both powerful and bearded, they were the heart and soul of the show, the juxtaposition of angelic voice with tense, jerking motions, like an abstraction of physical labor, were captivating. There was a genuine tenderness between them, born of (staged) affection, shared suffering or both.
The setting was simple, painstaking and powerful. Instrumentalists and singers moved between the four stages giving new shapes to different pieces. More of them appeared as the evening unfolded, but the pattern held fast: 90 uninterrupted minutes of call and response between different realizations of a common text while images of calamity and catastrophe appeared above. No specific argument was made, but the message was unmissable: the impending end won’t be personal but global. It may not be near, the demise spans centuries, but it is nevertheless inevitable. We’re gathered by the river, the river that brings life and commerce, and it will eventually run dry.
They sang about God, and about humility before God, but they sang for the God-given Earth. All we can really know of God is the bounty given us, and it is disappearing. A singular statement, however, no matter how profound or important, even understated nearly to the point of subliminality for an hour and a half, runs the risk of redundancy. The production was oddly more engaging and less effective than a traditional concert setting might have been. Maybe it’s the human tendency toward inattention that allows us to let our forests burn and our rivers run dry, but the staging suggested some sort of development – Disaster! Salvation! Redemption! – that wasn’t forthcoming.
Shall We Gather at the River was, to be certain, beautifully performed and executed, ending in a memorable duet aria (“O Menschenkind, hör auf geschwind”, from O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, BWV 20) by Mobley and tenor Nick Pritchard with an athletic double crab dance going on behind them. But even still, the return of the sheng, played with uncommon force by Wu Tong, made me welcome not the end of days but at minimum the end of swinging between prophecies.
