In a Tale of Deliverance, It’s Moses to the Rescue

Immediacy is the goal of the Passover Seder, commemorating the biblical story of the Jews’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Through the retelling of that story and the explication of rituals and symbols, Seder participants are supposed to become convinced that the Exodus happened to them. Tradition relates that the wicked child asks on Passover, “What does all this mean to you?,” distancing himself from what should be utterly personal.

With a vivid story — those plagues! — and the imperative to find oneself in it, it’s a natural for dramatic adaptation, and the German Jewish composer Paul Dessau based his oratorio “Haggadah Shel Pesach,” written after he fled the Nazis in 1933, on the Seder’s “script.”

On Thursday Leon Botstein and his adventurous American Symphony Orchestra, joined by the Collegiate Chorale Singers and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, brought this rarely heard work to Carnegie Hall for its American premiere. The Exodus narrative must have seemed relevant and hopeful during the rise of Fascism, but Dessau’s sober “Haggadah,” despite stirring moments, only rarely achieves the intimacy and urgency the Seder aims for.

Filtering the influence of Bach’s and Mendelssohn’s classic oratorios through the innovations of Wagner, Mahler and Stravinsky, “Haggadah,” like the Seder itself, both shows and tells: the Exodus story is juxtaposed with explanations of symbols. Declamatory passages — they aren’t quite arias — alternate with choruses, as the orchestra chimes along sympathetically. Dessau’s score is best when it is strangest, as with the shimmering in the orchestra when the baby Moses is rescued from the Nile and the misty dissonances of the chorus’s “Midnight Hymn.”

But that hymn lingers too long. The plagues are represented, predictably, by eerie suspended string chords, and God is voiced by a stentorian male chorus, just as you would expect. The Egyptians pursue the Jews into the sea to standard-issue chase music. The work often has the feel of the film scores Dessau specialized in, an effective support for visuals but bland on its own.

The music’s firm squareness suited Mr. Botstein, never the most flexible of conductors. As always, he and his orchestra deserve immense credit for their bold programming and advocacy of overlooked works.

The choruses and soloists were generally solid, but the great baritone Sanford Sylvan, who sang Moses with his usual authority, clarity and nuance, was in another league. His diction was impeccable, his phrasing sensitive and honest. He is a riveting, communicative artist who appears too rarely in New York. When he sang, this ancient, familiar story felt as it should: truly immediate.