The classic side
By Inma J. Ferrero
There is a moment before every word, when silence has not yet learned its own name and darkness holds, untouched, the possibility of all things. It is into this primordial realm that Genesis, the international project conceived by Baruch Berliner, invites us: an artistic journey towards the birth of the world and the abysses of human consciousness, where creation and freedom meet and destiny still seems like a blank page.
Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to imagine how it all began. We have raised myths, uttered prayers, written poems, and gazed at the stars in search of an answer to the question that remains untouched beneath all others: where do we come from, and what meaning does our presence in the universe hold? Yet perhaps the fascination of origins lies not merely in discovering what happened before us, but in understanding which part of that story continues to unfold within each of us.
It is at this threshold between the universal and the intimate that Genesis comes into being. Baruch Berliner, composer, mathematician, philosopher, and writer, transforms the earliest biblical narratives into a musical work that does not simply recount the birth of the world, but explores the forces that shape the human experience. His symphonic poem unfolds across seven fundamental episodes: Creation, Adam and Eve, the Expulsion from Paradise, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Flood, and the Covenant with Humanity. Yet beneath this succession of familiar images lies a question that transcends every age: the struggle between good and evil, and the possibility of choosing, even when choice means facing the consequences of our own actions.
For to create a world is not merely to bring light into existence. It is also to open a space in which freedom can exist, with all its grandeur and all its danger. From the moment human beings are able to choose, the story of creation ceases to be merely a tale about the beginning of things and becomes a story about responsibility. Paradise can be lost, love can yield to jealousy, coexistence can fracture, and destruction can spread until life itself is threatened. Yet even after the fall, the possibility of a new beginning remains open.
In my view, this is one of the reasons why Berliner’s project retains such a profoundly human resonance. Its characters belong to an ancient narrative, but their conflicts have not grown old. Cain and Abel continue to inhabit the contradictions of our species; the Flood still evokes the moment when the consequences of our decisions seem to overwhelm every possibility of repair, while the Covenant introduces a different kind of light: not the light of a world that will never know pain, but that of a world still capable of aspiring to hope. The ancient becomes present because, deep down, we are still learning to live alongside the same forces that shaped those first stories.
Music is the language Berliner has chosen to approach this mystery. Where an explanation may close off meaning, sound allows it to breathe; where words name events, music can make us feel their weight, their beauty, or their menace without compelling us to translate every emotion into a concrete thought. A melody can contain the innocence of a beginning and, within that very breath, hint at the fragility of all we love. It can bring us close to darkness without condemning us to remain there, opening, between two notes, a space for what we still do not know how to express.
The union of music, narration, and video art expands this language, transforming Genesis into an artistic experience capable of taking different forms. The spoken word brings the audience closer to the narrative that inspires the composition; the images extend its symbolic dimension, while the music establishes an emotional current between them that runs through the work. Alongside its classical version for narrator and orchestra, the project has developed into other formats, including symphonic rock, ballet, and various concert presentations. The story retains its essence while discovering new ways of expressing itself, as though each artistic language were opening a different door onto the same mystery.
This capacity for transformation is part of the project’s own story. Since its beginnings, Genesis has steadily widened its horizons, reaching audiences in numerous countries through performances that embrace different languages and sensibilities. Along this journey, Najum Slutzker has played a decisive role alongside Berliner, helping to drive the production and international dissemination of the work. A vision conceived in the intimacy of creation has thus found the means to travel, renew itself, and enter into dialogue with people who may not share the same culture, yet can recognise themselves in the essential questions the work raises.
There is something profoundly poetic about this journey. Every work of art begins as an inward form, an intuition that has not yet come into existence beyond the person who imagines it. Then it must travel through time, finding other hands, other voices, and other eyes, until what once belonged to a single consciousness begins to become part of the experience of many. Along the way, the work does not remain unchanged: it is enriched by each new interpretation and reveals nuances that may not even have been visible at its first birth. Creation, then, ceases to be a completed event and becomes a force that continues to transform itself.
Within this universe stands Lior Shambadal, a conductor and composer whose musical journey has been shaped by years of study, work, and encounters with different interpretative traditions. His collaboration with the project brings an artistic presence worth considering not only in terms of the responsibility of conducting an orchestra, but also through the particular sensitivity with which a musician approaches a work concerned with origins, contradiction, and freedom. For some interpreters do more than give shape to a composition: they seem to search, beyond its notes, for the secret thought that keeps it alive.
I have always felt that orchestral conducting shares a mysterious affinity with poetry. Both call for an extraordinary attentiveness to what cannot be seen: to intervals, pauses, and that invisible breath which determines the moment when an expression reaches its truth. A poet may choose every word, yet something more than mastery of language is needed to bring a verse to life. In the same way, a conductor may know a score in all its complexity, but there is a dimension of interpretation that knowledge alone cannot provide. One must listen beyond what is written, recognise the tensions running through a work, and understand that the deepest emotion sometimes emerges from what is held back rather than what is displayed.
There is something in Lior Shambadal’s relationship with music that invites us to linger precisely at that threshold. His presence brings to mind the tension between strength and delicacy, between the will to lead and the need to listen, between the clarity of someone who knows his path and the sensitivity of someone who understands that no path reveals itself entirely in advance. It is a combination that interests me because it resists any simple image of the artist. True depth rarely allows itself to be reduced to a single quality; more often, it inhabits the contradictions a person learns to hold without losing their centre.
Perhaps the art of conducting consists, to a great extent, in understanding that strength does not always need to assert itself, and that sensitivity is not a form of weakness. There is a kind of authority born of attentiveness, of the ability to perceive the smallest movements and to know when a gesture must open the way and when it must withdraw, allowing the music to find its own voice. Reaching this balance requires more than the ability to organise sound: it demands a profound relationship with time, with waiting, and with the unrepeatable nature of every moment.
I like to imagine this relationship as a silent dialogue between the artist and that which he seeks to reveal. The score contains a possibility, but not its only realisation; it awaits someone able to approach it with knowledge and, at the same time, with the humility required not to confuse interpretation with possession. In that encounter, mastery of the craft and intuition cease to be opposing forces. Experience makes it possible to recognise what is essential, while sensitivity prevents the essential from becoming a formula.
Perhaps this is why the image of a conductor standing before an orchestra can be so eloquent: a man who must bring many individual wills together without erasing their differences, sustain a shared architecture without silencing the voices that compose it, and guide a music whose ultimate destination lies beyond his control. The task demands resolve, but also a certain kind of trust; it requires presence, though its purpose is not to occupy the centre, but to make it possible for something greater than the individual gesture to reach its fulfilment. In this paradox, I find an image that extends beyond music, for life, too, asks us to learn the difference between what we can guide and what we must allow to exist.
Within the context of Genesis, this sensitivity takes on a particular resonance. A work that explores human freedom, the fragility of our choices, and the possibility of beginning again must find, in every interpretation, something more than a reproduction of its forms. It must remain a living question. Musical direction takes part in the delicate process through which a composition conceived in another time comes to inhabit the present once more. In this renewal, the interpreter’s experience meets the composer’s vision without diminishing it or becoming subordinate to it.
Some people seem to understand the world through what they do; others reveal as much through their silences as through their actions. In an artist, these two dimensions sometimes become inseparable: the craft turns into a form of personal expression, and the way it is practised offers glimpses of a sensitivity that reaches beyond technique. What interests me in Lior Shambadal is precisely this possibility: that music might be more than a discipline mastered, that it might also be a place of encounter with oneself, a way of bringing order to chaos without pretending that chaos has disappeared. For perhaps an artist’s maturity does not consist in having resolved every contradiction, but in having learned to listen to them without allowing them to destroy the harmony he is trying to create.
And this is one of the intuitions Genesis brings most powerfully to life: creation does not eliminate conflict; it compels us to discover what we will do with it. Freedom does not guarantee goodness, just as knowledge does not guarantee wisdom. Between what we desire and what we choose lies a delicate space in which our relationship with others and with ourselves is defined, again and again. Berliner’s work ventures into this space without reducing it to an easy answer, reminding us that every human being takes part in an ancient struggle whose outcome has never been written in advance.
Perhaps this is why the hope running through Genesis is not a promise of perfection, but an invitation to continue. After the fall, after the violence, after the waters that seem to erase every trace of what came before, the story opens once more. Not because suffering has no consequences, but because the future need not be an inevitable repetition of the past. There remains the possibility of learning, of repairing, of choosing differently. And this possibility, however small it may seem against the immensity of the universe, contains a remarkable form of greatness.
The work reminds us, then, that origins do not belong exclusively to some distant time. Whenever a person faces an essential decision, something begins anew; whenever someone chooses compassion over cruelty, responsibility over indifference, or hope over surrender, they take part in a creation that is never quite complete. The world is made not only of what we inherit, but also of what we add through our actions, our words, and the way we choose to look upon others.
As I reach the end of this journey, I feel that the opening question has changed its shape. It is no longer merely a matter of imagining how the first light appeared, but of understanding what we do with it. Baruch Berliner has found in music a language through which to explore this mystery; the project’s international journey shows how a vision can cross borders and transform itself without losing its essence, while the artists who perform it allow its questions to come alive again before each new audience. In this union of thought, sound, and imagination, Genesis finds its strength: it does not offer us a closed universe, but invites us to take part in one that is still being born.
And perhaps this is the true wonder of music: its ability to make us feel, for a fleeting moment, that the universe is not some distant immensity stretching above our heads, but a mystery of which we, too, are a part. That the story of the first lights has not ended, that darkness does not have the final word, and that even at the heart of our contradictions, a promise of transformation can endure.
Then we imagine the primordial silence, vast and untouched, before names, before borders, before memory; a silence that was not absence, but expectancy, an immense reserve of possibilities in which everything that exists remained without form. And from that depth, a vibration begins to rise, faint at first, almost imperceptible, until sound finds its way and creation ceases to be a promise and becomes a presence.
The music grows into a force that crosses the night, gathers scattered voices, and awakens what seemed to have slept since the beginning of time. In its ascent resound innocence and the fall, love and violence, the abyss of our decisions and the unyielding will to begin again. Everything human finds its place there, not as a finished story, but as an open possibility still awaiting our response.
And when the light seems to flood everything, we understand that we have not merely witnessed the imagined birth of a world, but awakened to an immense responsibility: to care for what exists, to refuse to surrender our freedom to darkness, to recognise that every choice can destroy or preserve a part of creation. For true greatness does not lie in having been born into the light, but in deciding what we do with it when the moment to choose arrives.
Thus Genesis opens the gates of the beginning once more and places us before the mystery of all that may yet be. The music rises, silence is transformed, and the universe seems to hold, within a single breath, every story that has ever been and every story still awaiting birth. There is no final frontier to the imagination, nor any word capable of bringing the meaning of creation entirely to a close; there is, instead, a promise that travels through time and reaches us wherever we remain capable of wonder.
For perhaps, before light existed, there was already the possibility that something might one day be illuminated; before the first voice was born, there was already the longing to be heard; and before the world knew its name, the mystery of all that might one day come to be was already beating in the silence.
Music returns us to that impossible moment and, for an instant, allows us to feel that we are present at the origin of all things, before a creation that has yet to unfold completely and a freedom that places the future in our hands once more.
And then the final note does not fall into the void, but becomes a horizon; silence is no longer the place where everything ends, but the vast space in which everything may begin again. Light passes through the night, the night discovers that it, too, held seeds of brightness, and the entire universe seems to rise in one single, inexhaustible promise: as long as the possibility of choice remains, no story will ever be written forever.
For creation did not happen only once, in a time lost before memory. It continues in every consciousness that awakens, in every hand that builds instead of destroys, in every human being who, when faced with darkness, chooses to become light.
And perhaps this is the music that preceded the first dawn and that still sounds within us today, invisible and immense: the music of all that exists, all that can be transformed, and all that is still waiting to be born.
GENESIS PROJECT:
Website: https://berlinersgenesis.com/es/home/
PROMOTIONAL VIDEO:
Promotional Video about Baruch Berliner’s International Project
English translation by Cristina Díaz.