by Daniel Hathaway
Young Matthew Shepard’s iconic suffering and death in Wyoming in October of 1998 have inspired a number of social, political, and artistic initiatives, including Craig Hella Johnson’s “passion oratorio” Considering Matthew Shepard.
Johnson was deeply affected by the murder of the young University of Wyoming student, who was offered a ride from a gay bar by two young men who took him to a remote spot, bound him to a split-rail fence, beat him unmercifully, and left him to die on a freezing night on the prairie.
Members of the Cleveland Orchestra joined participants in the new Choral Institute in performing excerpts from the work led by Lisa Wong, the Orchestra’s Director of Choruses, on June 26 at Severance Music Center. Preparing and presenting a one-hour version of Johnson’s nearly two-hour work was the central agenda of the inaugural week-long Summer Choral Institute. Nothing essential to Matthew’s story was lost in the process.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s passion settings with their narration, reflective arias, and congregational hymns were an obvious model for Considering Matthew Shepard. But other influences include Broadway, Country & Western, Blues, Jazz, Appalachian hymnody, and Gospel.
The composer also draws on a wide range of texts by poets including Hildegard of Bingen, Lesléa Newman, Michael Dennis Browne, and Rumi along with passages from Matt’s personal journal, interviews, writings from his parents, and newspaper reports.
Introducing Matthew Shepard as if thumbing through someone’s scrapbook, Johnson makes much of the “ordinary boy” whose murder made him extraordinary, a type of Everyman to whom we can all relate in some way.
The huge chorus was the main storyteller on Thursday evening, and under Wong’s masterful direction, sang with an alluring blend while producing a variety of sounds from whispery chants and soulful spirituals to exultant, full-throated anthems.
There are unmistakable parallels in the oratorio between Matthew’s fate — his body beaten and tied to a fence — and Christ’s — scourged and nailed to a cross.
Poetic imagery takes up where narrative leaves off: Christ’s body supported pietá-like by the wood of the “tree,” and Matthew’s cradled against the freezing prairie night in the arms of The Fence, an actual character touchingly personified by Lucas Buherman during “The Fence Before,” and Dashon Burton“The Fence That Night,” who chillingly sang, “I held him all night long — I saw what was done to his child — The truck was the last thing that he saw.”
The narrative picks up with Matthew’s discovery the next morning by a student who first thought he was a scarecrow (voiced in a bluesy, jazz-infused aria rivetingly sung by mezzo-soprano Bri Mosely), and “The News of Matthew’s Murder” spreads with Burton’s “Fire of the Ancient Heart” as the two killers receive life sentences, and the Fence is torn down.
Johnson’s Epilogue wraps the oratorio up in a hopeful blaze of Gospel glory with “Meet me here,”stunningly led by soprano Caitlin Glastonbury, and “All of Us,” the chorus topped off by powerful singing from Glastonbury, soprano Anna Bjerken, and mezzo-soprano Bri Mosely.
The Summer Choral Institute made an impressive start and the first effort by Lisa Wong and company was soundly validated by the huge ovation it received from the crowd. We can’t wait to see what’s next for this new enterprise.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com July 2, 2026
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