Premiere of Leshnoff's 'Hope'

The Requiem and the Kaddish have long provided flexible frameworks for composers seeking a way to regard death and salvage hope from the ashes. Jonathan Leshnoff, the Baltimore composer commissioned to write a big choral work for the Kimmel Center's Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, played a slight variation on those themes with his oratorio

Hope

, heard Sunday in its premiere.

The performance, conducted by Roberto Minczuk, gathered the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Mendelssohn Club Chorus, the Pennsylvania Girlchoir, and four singers with roots in diverse capitals of the musical world. Leshnoff, in preperformance remarks, found texts for this hopeful journey in the Psalms, Walt Whitman, spirituals, Persian poetry, and even a child's poem.

The trick is to find a unified voice in all these sources that leads the music irresistibly onward in its long arc toward conclusion. Leonard Bernstein bunched marching bands, ballads, spirituals, and arias in his Mass, a work that traced a similar path and antagonized its first audiences. But its theatricality and moral force have carved it a place in late 20th-century significance.

Leshnoff's texts are not so vivid - or clearly imagined or articulated in this reading - as to force their way that deeply into memory. Is it Verizon Hall's acoustic that blurs texts meant to press the composer's argument forward?

His facility with orchestral sounds was sometimes used to express the obvious, but generally established moods and nuance more eloquent than the singers' texts. Shimmering xylophones and marimba, stalwart piano interjections, and the harp's firm lines said more about hope than some of the choral work.

His soloists, tenor Jason Collins and mezzo-soprano Leah Dexter, contrasted with jazz singer David Linx and world-music interpreter Jessica Rivera. Those contrasting textures and styles provided a counterpoint that did not enlarge the theatricality of the work as it wound through its messages of hope and doubt.

Collins and Dexter toured substantial scenes, sometimes together, sometimes in extended solo work. Their singing was direct and polished, and winningly tied to the varieties of orchestral sound. Linx, seeming a little restricted by the formal concert setting, offered some scat singing in "Goodnight God," the child's poem in the second part of the work, and joined the quartet in scenes that seemed to lose rather than gain force from contrast. The soprano bridged the worlds of concert and vernacular styles, her distinctive sound suggesting the voice of the people.

The orchestral textures noted images in the texts, and provided structural signposts that gave the work its often satisfying instrumental unity. The piece moved carefully toward a substantial climax, with the full forces joined by the organ, before gradually fading into a closing whisper. A long silence kept the mood before applause responded to the work.