William Jon Gray, the Conductor and Artistic Director of the Burnt Hills Oratorio Society, talks about Mendelssohn’s Elijah, an Oratorio the Burnt Hills Oratorio Society will perform on Friday, May 19, at Skidmore College. It’s an intense, deeply philosophical work that Mendelssohn wanted to write for at least 10 years. When it finally premiered in 1846 with Mendelssohn himself conducting, one reviewer said “the last note of Elijah was drowned in a long-continued unanimous volley of plaudits, vociferous and deafening ... never was there a more complete triumph; never a more thorough and speedy recognition of a great work of art.”
