It's a shame that musical organizations pour weeks of rehearsal and gallons of sweat equity into a concert production and only get to do it once.
That would be the case with Saturday night's paragon performance by the combined University of Arkansas at Little Rock Community Chorus and the Second Presbyterian Church Choir of Felix Mendelssohn's Old Testament-based oratorio Elijah on Saturday night at Little Rock's First Presbyterian Church.
Conductor Bevan Keating assembled a pantheon of superb, church-filling operatic and oratorical solo voices, and the force of the choral forces was almost too powerful for the venerable downtown sanctuary to contain.
Bass-baritone Robert Holden was superb, though sufficiently restrained that he almost took a back seat to his musical colleagues, in the title role of the Hebrew prophet who has been enforcing God's three-year drought to bring to heel idolatrous King Ahab (tenor Ethan Ezell) and his wicked queen, Jezebel (mezzo-soprano Kelley Ponder, one of the stars of the show, also doing double duty as Elijah's guardian angel).
Excelling in secondary solo roles, and also members of various ensembles: tenor Luke Angelo as subsidiary prophet Obadiah, soprano Shannon Rookey as a widow whose dying son Elijah (at some musical length) revives, sopranos Melanie Hanna and Shea Williamson as second and third angels (Williamson aced the second act's opening aria, "Hear ye, Israel") and soprano Elizabeth Riddick as the lookout Youth who spots the long-awaited rain cloud over the sea that spurs the first act's closing thanksgiving chorus.
Soprano Kira Keating and mezzo Satia Spencer effectively begged, early and with the chorus in response, for God to hear their prayer for deliverance. They joined tenor Ezell and bass Jon Stevenson for the moving penultimate quartet, "O, come, everyone who thirsteth, come to the waters." The 100 or so chorus voices ably represented a dozen or so angels; the population of Israel, alternately pleading, penitent and violent; and the increasingly desperate prophets of Baal.
Keating took some judicious cuts to the score -- not anything that anybody not familiar with the piece would miss -- that kept the performance to just over two hours.
Adam Savacool at the keyboard of the church's magnificent Nichols & Simpson organ (the principal reason this performance took place at this church) filled in brass and wind parts that were otherwise lacking from a stripped-down, nine-piece orchestra -- string quartet (with the cellist providing the obbligato for Elijah's lengthy, despairing wilderness aria, "It Is Enough"), three woodwinds, trumpet and timpani.
Metro on 04/29/2018