Greed, sloth, lust: 'Seven sins' gain theatrical appeal
They've inspired clerics and ice-cream makers, artists and scholars - and now the seven deadly sins are being molded by a group of contemporary composers.
Envy, vanity, and the other marquee vices (lust, greed, gluttony, anger, and sloth) are the focus of a new collection of songs, "The Seven Deadly Sins," debuting at Carnegie Hall next week.
Written for soprano/actress Audra McDonald and a sextet of musicians, the pieces draw on a range of genres including jazz, country-and-western, and classical. Some of them are as dark as a 20th-century musical work on the "deadlies" from the dramatist/composer team of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. But several of the new songs treat their respective sins with humor. One piece - on sloth - even invites audience participation.
Variety of tone is what the concert's musical director and pianist, Ted Sperling, had hoped for when he and Ms. McDonald settled on the deadly sins as an organizing theme. Interpreting the sins offered artistic freedom to the commissioned writers, and a chance to showcase McDonald's theatrical side, including "a real sense of playfulness and fun and wickedness," he says in an interview.
"In many ways, those sins, they're deadly, but they're also something that we struggle with every day to greater or lesser degrees," he says, explaining another reason for the choice: universal recognition.
Blending seven pieces that were each crafted separately by composers and lyricists into one seamless song cycle is complicated. (The pieces - just a few minutes long - were mostly written in a month or less, when a previously scheduled new work dropped out.) But McDonald is a good candidate to pull it off, according to at least one of the participants.
"It could be a huge mess, but we know because of her, she'll make it work, because of her talent and personality," says composer Jake Heggie, who has taken a humorous approach to his assigned sin: vanity.
To find a modern voice for their works, the writers drew on sources as varied as the Internet and their own experiences. Ricky Ian Gordon kept a journal documenting how he felt about envy and everything he felt envious of, for example. He then worked on honing that down to something more universal that McDonald could convey to an audience.
"I was taking all these notes, and all of a sudden I realized that envy felt like an actual character inside of me," he explains. "...it was like I was staring down this thing in me, and suddenly it was like envy started talking."
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