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upbringing as well as the modal music that accompanied the Muslim African diaspora — idioms that come to the fore, for example, when Omar is conversing internally with the spirit of his mother. Instrumental selections from Senegal and the folk music of the Carolinas provide a general context for the sources that influenced Giddens.

Abels went beyond merely transcribing and orchestrating this material. He describes serving as a “sounding board” for Giddens, allowing her to focus on her melody-centered process and then “bringing that into a world that is operatic.” This involved enhancing the music with transitions and harmonic context, as well as ensuring that the musical narrative would be effectively paced as an unfolding drama — a skill that Abels has fine-tuned through his career in film music.

Abels emphasizes that he and Giddens both intend Omar “to be written in one artistic voice” that preserves the identities of each. By eschewing a clear-cut division of labor with compartmentalized tasks assigned to each party, their collaborative process might be said to embody another sense of “liquid borders.”

A new stage has been added to their collaboration with the creation of Omar’s Journey. According to Abels, the biggest challenge has not been scaling down the orchestration but rather selecting what needs to be retained in order to preserve a sense of the journey at the opera’s core. It’s a journey in two senses, he adds: both

Omar’s physical journey — during his prime, from his life as a flourishing scholar to a foreign land where he was subjected to unimaginable dehumanization — and his inner emotional and spiritual journey. The second of the opera’s two acts focuses on the spirituality that sustains Omar and gives him a sense of purpose, despite the attempts of the enslavers to suppress and replace it with their own worldview.

While the chorus has a significant presence in the opera, the concert version relies on five singers to tell the story; they sometimes join forces to form an intimate chorus. Replacing an orchestra hidden in the pit with an onstage ensemble contributes to the music making “in a way that you might not be as conscious of in an operatic format,” as Abels puts it, with the instrumentalists becoming “equally as important as the singers.” (This involves not so much a reduction as a return to the small ensemble he and Giddens used while workshopping the opera.)

Omar and Omar’s Journey convey the pain and trauma carried by the African people — by people “descended from these stories,” as Giddens puts it. But essential to her retelling is Omar’s triumph in overcoming these impossible circumstances and finding the strength to remain true to his identity. That triumph resounds in the music that has in turn nourished America’s cultural identity.

—THOMAS MAY

This concert is approximately 110 minutes.