Exciting Week

Mary (finally) pays tuition then comes home to celebrate her birthday...she gets to attend Enemy Slayer along with our house guests: Alonzo -from Quereterro and and the Composer Mark Grey, Navajo Librettist Laura Tohe and Photographer Deborah O'Grady of the Navajo Oratorio. What an amazing Week!

Deseret News article reported "Musically, "Enemy Slayer" is stunning. It moves from breathtakingly beautiful and lush passages to sections that are stringently dissonant, and finally ends peacefully and simply. Yet everything is cohesive and quite seamless. It is a hypnotic work that makes quite an impression on the listener.
With a libretto by Navajo poet Laura Tohe, the work tells a compelling story of Seeker, a Native American returning home to the reservation from the war in Iraq. He is emotionally scarred by what he has been through, including the death of his brother who was killed in action. Plagued by these inner demons, he undergoes a traditional Navajo healing ceremony to be cleansed.
The oratorio itself is the actual ceremony, and underscoring that, Seeker, sung by baritone Gary Sorenson, was dressed not in traditional concert attire but in everyday clothes: jeans, open shirt and sneakers. And Allred, symbolizing the medicine man in this ceremony, wore a ceremonial silver and turquoise necklace.
The visual element is quite forceful in this story, aided by Deborah O'Grady's photography taken on a reservation and projected on a large screen onstage to one side of the orchestra"