14th Street Y Presents 3WEEKS Concerts, 9/28-30

-The 14^th Street Y, through its LABA program, presents the concert-staging premiere of 3WEEKS (www.yoavgal.com/threeweeks), a multi-media opera that traces the events of the Roman siege of Jerusalem. The opera, replete with many subplots, contradicting variations of the story, and commentary, is composed by Yoav Gal, with libretto by Reuven (Ruby) Namdar, music directed by Yegor Shevtsov, and directed by Ronit Muszkatblit. The opera will be performed on September 28^th, 29^th, and 30^th, 2012 at The Theater at the 14^th Street Y for four performances only. Tickets are $ 25 and can be purchased online at http://14streety.interticket.com/.

The year is 68 AD… Roman legions are camped outside the walls of Jerusalem. Inside the walls, the zealots refuse to surrender. Thinking they can force the population to rise up against the Romans, they burn the city’s stores of food and fuel, leaving the inhabitants in dire straits.  In a vision, Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai sees the destruction of the Temple, Jerusalem in flames, and knows the Jews can never defeat the might of the Roman Empire. 

Despairing over the fate of the city and its inhabitants, Ben Zakkai gambles that his people could survive without a homeland. Risking his own life, he smuggles himself outside the walls disguised as a corpse. There he meets with the Roman General Vespasian, and pleads “give me Yavneh and its sages,” which in effect means surrendering the glorious capital city of Jerusalem, and asking only for a  modest house of study (beit midrash) in the small coastal city (located between Jaffa and Ashdod in Israel). When the Romans finally conquer Jerusalem, destroy the Second Temple, and forcibly exile the population, it is Yavneh that becomes the center for Jewish learning and a keeper of its traditions. The consequences of Ben Zakkai’s decision to abandon sovereignty for religion, and in essence, give up the material for the spiritual, have resonated throughout the centuries up until the present day.

3WEEKS is scored for nine singers, and twelve musicians. In 2008, Gal, inspired by Namdar’s readings of classical Jewish texts during a LABA fellowship, approached him with the idea of creating an opera based upon the seminal Talmudic story of Rabban Ben Zakkai and his fateful bargain with the Romans. Namdar collected Talmudic sources and meticulously assembled them, keeping the reiterations, contradictions, and the absurdities typical of a legend passed down through the generations, intact. The libretto is in Hebrew and Aramaic, the original languages of the Talmud, and the text sung by the Roman characters was translated back into Latin from Hebrew and Aramaic. The opera was among ten new operatic works in progress selected to be performed at the New York City Opera’s VOX festival in 2011. 

“Opera, being highly stylized deals not in the faithful reproduction of events,” says Gal, “but rather in the contemplation of their emotional and spiritual meaning. This opera dramatizes a crucial turning point in the Jewish cannon in addition to being a multi-layered human drama. It presents the audience with the opportunity to absorb the story indirectly, and through a sensory experience relive the crisis of the Roman’s conquest of Jerusalem, and the destruction of the Temple itself.” 

In his review of the 2011 VOX Festival, Zachary Woolfe of the New York Times singled out the workshop performance of 3WEEKS by saying:

“Only the weekend’s final selection, Yoav Gal’s “Three Weeks,” seemed truly fresh: quite an achievement considering that its libretto, by Reuven Namdar, is in Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic and that its plot takes place around A.D. 70. An episodic stylized story of the rabbi who tries to save Jerusalem from Roman invaders, it manages to be serious without being ponderous.  Scored for three trombones, piano, percussion and double bass, the music has a brassy, sinuous klezmer flavor; its vocal lines recall traditional Hebrew melodies without seeming stale. From the start, with a tantalizingly strange short video element, there was a feeling of slightly manic, ramshackle energy.  The piece is not afraid to play with operatic conventions, as in the Roman general’s exaggerated coloratura, but neither is it emptily ironic. It was unpredictable — sometimes absurd, sometimes sincere — but with a core of real feeling. You didn't know what was going to happen next. It’s impossible to say what it will eventually amount to, but alone among the works at this year’s VOX it felt new.”