Music Review: Telling a Temple’s Tale From the Nile to the Met

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Zachary Woolfe

The ensemble Alarm Will Sound performing “I Was Here I Was I,”
the Kate Soper work, at the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing at the Met.

NEW YORK---The sandstone temple was built around 15 B.C. on the west bank of the Nile, roughly 600 miles south of Cairo. With the construction of the Aswan Dam, starting in 1960, the temple was threatened with inundation. In gratitude for the assistance of the United States in saving the structure, Egypt gave it to the American government, which in turn awarded it to the Met. The tranquil, soaring space in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that has housed the Temple of Dendur since 1978 is so beloved that New Yorkers could be forgiven for thinking that the temple itself is beside the point, merely an excuse for the glamorous room, with its sweeping wall of glass. Its millenniums-spanning past is explored in “I Was Here I Was I,” a serene, sometimes elegant, sometimes listless new music-theater work by the composer Kate Soper and the librettist and director Nigel Maister performed on Friday by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound and its conductor, Alan Pierson, in the temple’s Sackler Wing pavilion. [link]