There's a good deal of background to Richard Danielpour's oratorio The Passion of Yeshua, and it will provide fodder for discussion in the coming years in the fields of biblical exegesis and reception history. It is a telling of the Passion drawing on the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh , whose words are used to dramatize the story. Some of the music is in Hebrew, some in English, and there are three sources for the English text: the Revised New Standard translation, the Complete Jewish Bible of Messianic Jewish theologian ...
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There's a good deal of background to Richard Danielpour's oratorio The Passion of Yeshua, and it will provide fodder for discussion in the coming years in the fields of biblical exegesis and reception history. It is a telling of the Passion drawing on the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh , whose words are used to dramatize the story. Some of the music is in Hebrew, some in English, and there are three sources for the English text: the Revised New Standard translation, the Complete Jewish Bible of Messianic Jewish theologian David Stern, and, at a climactic moment, the words of Danielpour himself, whose origins lie in Persian Judaism. The composer selected the texts, a project that entailed pondering and personal discovery over more than two decades. There is much to think about here, but for average listeners, the work is a fine example of Danielpour's popular operatic style, here transferred to a fairly conventional oratorio form with a narrator (baritone Matthew Worth), choruses, and...
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