How to Use oratorio in a Sentence

oratorio

noun
  • So you were drawn to the idea of writing an oratorio?
    — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 14 Oct. 2025
  • An oratorio is a large concert piece for orchestra and singers.
    — David Lyman, The Enquirer, 12 July 2024
  • The oratorio concerns the death of an old man and his journey into paradise.
    — Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor, 24 Dec. 2025
  • His stature is owed above all to a single work—the oratorio Messiah.
    — Jan Swafford, The Atlantic, 29 Oct. 2024
  • What remains is a gloomy, 65-minute oratorio that extends the prison setting to the wider world.
    — Heidi Waleson, WSJ, 12 June 2019
  • This one-of-a-kind Spanish-language oratorio will be released next year.
    — Beth Wood, San Diego Union-Tribune, 21 Dec. 2025
  • The abridgment resulted in the loss of fully half the oratorio.
    — Special To The Plain Dealer, cleveland.com, 19 Jan. 2018
  • Soon, however, the oratorio reaches a turning point, the sting of hate and pain giving way to chords of serenity and peace.
    — Howard Reich, chicagotribune.com, 13 Sep. 2019
  • That work includes a second documentary, a book and an oratorio.
    — New York Times, 16 Aug. 2021
  • Most come to the oratorio's biblical figures as themselves, but at least one appears incognito.
    — ABC News, 22 Mar. 2026
  • The oratorio, meanwhile, has a tumultuous history of its own.
    — The Economist, 22 Mar. 2018
  • Within this small boy, so modest in his manner, there were symphonies unwritten, suites and concertos and oratorios.
    — Cynthia Ozick, New York Times, 14 May 2018
  • For more than a century, the performance of great oratorio has been defined in Cincinnati by a chorus that stands on risers and sings.
    — Janelle Gelfand, Cincinnati.com, 21 June 2017
  • The group gave the oratorio its Chicago premiere nearly 40 years ago and made one of its earliest recordings.
    — Alan Artner, chicagotribune.com, 16 May 2017
  • It was performed though not staged — that is, presented as a stony oratorio, with video animations on screens as illustration.
    — Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 7 June 2021
  • As staged by Patricia McGregor, the oratorio implied raw and rich street life.
    — Los Angeles Times, 10 June 2022
  • Director Lee Sunday Evans puts the band behind the high back row, and the singers spend most of the oratorio walking up and down the stairs all around us.
    — Helen Shaw, Vulture, 30 Mar. 2022
  • The final few sections of the long oratorio were marked by a few pitch issues and a little loosening of the cohesive ensemble work heard up to those final sections.
    — Elaine Schmidt, Journal Sentinel, 25 Mar. 2023
  • Soprano Mari Hahn is a versatile performer of opera, art song, oratorio, music theater and jazz.
    — Anchorage Daily News, 20 Apr. 2020
  • The hour-long oratorio is based on surgeon Richard Selzer’s book of essays of the same name, first published in 1974.
    — Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 Feb. 2018
  • The artists therefore turned to creating and performing oratorios, which are concert pieces that lack the opera's musical-theater component.
    — Lawrence Elizabeth Knox, Houston Chronicle, 13 Dec. 2017
  • Haupt worked with deaf people and a choreographer to develop a performance that would render not only the sung words of the oratorio, but also the character of the music.
    — New York Times, 9 Apr. 2021
  • Split into three parts, this oratorio tells of the coming of Christ to redeem the world, His ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension.
    — oregonlive, 28 Nov. 2022
  • What’s lost, during lapses like that, are the moments that inspire awe, replaced by a kind of white-knuckle anxiety in, for example, the grand chorus that closes the oratorio’s first part.
    — Joshua Barone, New York Times, 24 Mar. 2023
  • Costa-Jackson’s beautiful diction and rolled Rs would have been great in an oratorio, but this was not the way a punk Mimì, alert to everything around her, would sound.
    — Los Angeles Times, 15 Sep. 2019
  • But her fourth album, Lux, adopts the sound and ambitions of a classical oratorio to mirror the modern quest for salvation, in all its thrilling and frustrating contours.
    — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 11 Nov. 2025
  • Lift your voice alongside the Westwood Chancel Choir in a performance of Handel’s classic oratorio.
    — Los Angeles Times, 29 Nov. 2022
  • This large-scale, evening-length piece requires live musicians and a choir to perform Handel’s luminous three-part oratorio, as well as lots of space and supplementary dancers, meaning it’s not often staged.
    — Washington Post, 3 Mar. 2022
  • In the oratorio’s second part, the women discover the empty tomb, and the Angel declaring Jesus’ resurrection.
    — Scott Cantrell, Dallas News, 19 Apr. 2021
  • Planning the attack The press had announced that Napoleon would be attending the French premiere of the oratorio on December 24.
    — National Geographic, 20 Dec. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'oratorio.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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