"...Entering the small rehearsal room in the Israeli Opera building a few weeks ago felt like a return to the primordial, formless void of the Book of Genesis.... sounds of Yemenite songs ....drumming on a large olive tin ...blowing a shofar. ... Ashkenazi prayer .... Negev Bedouin singing and using a mortar-and-pestle coffee grinder as a percussion instrument....Ladino Romance ... Armenian community... Palestinian singer ....members of the Karaite community adding their hymns, prayers and murmurings to this impossible landscape of sound, while .... typical Bukharan songs of lamentation waft in the air.
This musical whirlwind rose and twisted, changed color, texture and volume until it subsided into a dialogue accompanied by whistles from Ethiopian keys (religious leaders)…. A few days later in Jaffa, with the addition of other members of the ensemble - players of various instruments, a narrator, and video and electronic-music artists - it emerged that this is a musical composition, an opera with a score, and that the performers were working hard to prepare for its premiere later in the month at the Cavallerizza Theater in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and subsequent performances in Milan and Parma. This was the sound of "Kolot" ("Voices"), by composer-guitarist Yuval Avital, a native of Jerusalem, who is also the conductor....”