A blizzard seemed an incongru ous prelude to an opera set in sizzling biblical Egypt, but the trudge through snowy SoHo on Wednesday night paid off with a glimpse of the intriguing new “Mosheh.”
Arts center HERE showcased this 90-minute opera by resident artist Yoav Gal, built around a series of extended vocal solos to Hebrew texts (with English subtitles) for four women in the life of the prophet Moses — or Mosheh, in Hebrew.
It starts as his sister, Miriam (Hai-Ting Chinn), warbles a gamelan-flavored lullaby to send her baby brother on his way as he floats in a basket down the river. The tempo accelerates to a bombastic Kurt Weill-style vamp as pharaoh’s daughter, Bitia, claims the child as her own.
Still later, Moses’ wife, Zipporah, rescues him from the wrath of God by simultaneously performing a circumcision and a coloratura aria — quite a trick! — while his birth mother, Yocheved, appears in a flashback for a moving solo with the simplicity and gentle insistence of a folk song.
Instrumental solos underlined dramatic transitions: A deep saxophone lament rattled the walls as Moses left for exile in Midian, and a flurry of breathy flute cadenzas evoked the uneasy awe of the burning bush.
The gem of the score, though, is a quartet for the women narrating the plagues of Egypt, a virtuoso slow march of writhing vocal lines and sudden subtle modulations. This sequence also offered the most effective moment of Kameron Steele’s otherwise fussy staging: a simple lineup of the quartet directly addressing the audience as, upstage, Nathan Guisinger’s buff, nonsinging Mosheh struck tai chi-like poses.
Otherwise, the visuals went over the top, with swirling video projections of the East River and a BQE overpass, as if the story of Moses were happening in our own time; slo-mo movement and campy costumes suggested Cirque du Soleil night at the Limelight.
Voices failed to bloom in the parched acoustics of HERE’s cramped black-box theater, but Beth Anne Hatton’s muscular soprano hammered out Zipporah’s stratospheric aria with bravura, and Judith Barnes lavished warm legato on Yocheved’s nostalgic song.
Though the stage production does him no favors, Gal’s rhythmically intense and beautifully heartfelt music should reward open-minded listeners.