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This work might well have been the first "crossover," long before the term was invented. Seven composers living in America---all but one European emigrés, all but one Jewish---each contributed one movement to a composition for chorus, orchestra, and narrator, based on excerpts from several chapters of
Genesis. The project was initiated and commissioned by the group's only American-born member, Nathaniel Shilkret, in response to a poll indicating that there was much public interest in the musical representation of the Bible. The result is a heady mixture of styles, further accentuated by the introduction of yet another participant, Patrick Russ, who was called in to reconstruct the orchestrations of three movements, the original material having been partially lost in a fire. To his great credit, his work melts indistinguishably into the style and quality of the music. The Suite's bookends are by two composers so diametrically opposed musically and personally that finding them collaborating on the same project is quite surprising. They are also the most famous and the only ones untouched by the influence of film music: Schoenberg, whose "Prelude" uses the 12-tone technique to set the mood of the primeval chaos, but ends in clear C major, and Stravinsky, who, determined to preserve the Bible's mystery, depicts the construction and destruction of the Tower of Babel in purely musical, highly contrapuntal terms, culminating in a return to chaos. The other composers, all active in Hollywood and surrounded by jazz and popular music, produce a kaleidoscope of soaring melodies, surging harmonies, and dynamic instrumental contrasts, colors and effects suitable to accompany a Biblical epic on screen. The music provides preludes, interludes, background and support for the narration, which, divided between two male and two female voices, weaves over, under and through it. The speaking, singing, and playing are excellent, but one of the female voices is seriously underbalanced.
--Edith Eisler
