May 16, 2023 • 7:45 am Comments Off on Music of Remembrance at 25
My story for the Seattle Times about Music of Remembrance at 25, which will present a double bill of one-act operas by Jake Heggie this weekend:
Mina Miller is convinced that music can make a difference in the world.
“I am the child of parents whose entire families were annihilated in the Holocaust, so I grew up with a visceral awareness of the power of memory — of the stories that need to be told…”
Filed under: commissions, Jake Heggie, Music of Remembrance, new opera, Seattle Times
January 27, 2023 • 9:51 am Comments Off on Holocaust Remembrance Day: Lori Laitman’s Wertheim Park
This year, with so much hate being spewed around the world, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust is especially important. Seattle’s invaluable Music of Remembrance, now in its 25th year, is offering a free streaming of composer Lori Laitman’s Wertheim Park. The program will begin streaming on Friday, 27 January, and remain available online.
The streamed program is an enhanced video of the world premiere of Wertheim Park by Music of Remembrance on 30 October 2022 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. It features soprano Alisa Jordheim, with an instrumental ensemble of Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Jonathan Green, double bass; and Mina Miller, piano.
Laitman’s sixth commission for Music of Remembrance, Wertheim Park sets a poem by the late Susan de Sola and is a haunting elegy about the power of bearing witness. It pictures the annual gathering at Amsterdam’s Wertheim Park, where people come together each year for Holocaust remembrance.
“When Music of Remembrance asked me to compose a piece for their 25th season,” said Laitman, “I decided to explore the impact of the Holocaust on the next generation. Poet Susan de Sola lost many of her relatives in the Shoah, and Wertheim Park is an intimate depiction of the memorial march and its emotional impact on her.”
Filed under: American music, Holocaust, Music of Remembrance
January 21, 2023 • 9:49 am Comments Off on Art From Ashes: Music of Remembrance
Starting tomorrow, Sunday, January 22 and running through Sunday, January 29, Music of Remembrance (MOR) will present its annual Art From Ashes concert to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This year’s concert, streamed free, offers a remastered video of selected works from a special event where MOR’s core ensemble performed on a quartet of historic instruments from the Violins of Hope collection.
That event at Benaroya Hall on March 1, 2020 – just before the pandemic shuttered all stages only days later – mostly features music by composers lost to the Holocaust: David Beigelman’s haunting Dybbuk Dances; string trios composed in the Terezín concentration camp by Gideon Klein and Hans Krása; and a quartet by Erwin Schulhoff. The concert opens with the Aria by Miecyslaw Weinberg, who suffered persecution at both Nazi and Soviet hands.These musical treasures remain as a testament to inspiring courage and resilience in a time of unfathomable horrors. They tell stories that resonate today as strongly as ever.
The Violins of Hope are a unique private collection of string instruments that belonged to Jews who played them before and during the Holocaust. Lovingly restored by Israeli violin makers Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein, they now sing again even though their former owners were silenced. They help keep history alive and connect us to inspiring and intimate human stories.
Music of Remembrance’s next live concert at Benaroya Hall on March 19, 2023 features mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke in Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope, a dramatic song cycle that was inspired by these historic instruments. The songs imagine the stories that the violins would tell about their own odysseys and those of their owners.
PROGRAM
Miecyslaw Weinberg
Aria, op. 9 (1942)
Mikhail Shmidt, violin Natasha Bazhanov, violin
Susan Gulkis Assadi, violaWalter Gray, cello
Hans Krása
Dance (Terezín, 1943)
Mikhail Shmidt, violin Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola Walter Gray, cello
Gideon Klein
String Trio (Terezín, 1944)
Mikhail Shmidt, violin Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola Walter Gray, cello
David Beigelman
Dybbuk Dances (Lodz, 1925)
Artur Girsky, violin Natasha Bazhanov, violin
Erwin Schulhoff
Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923)
Mikhail Shmidt, violin Natasha Bazhanov, violin
Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola Walter Gray, cello
Filed under: music news, Music of Remembrance
October 27, 2022 • 11:20 am Comments Off on Music of Remembrance Launches Its 25th Season
To launch this milestone season, Music of Remembrance (MOR) founder and artistic director Mina Miller has curated a remarkable program that will take place at Benaroya Hall on Sunday, 30 October, at 5pm. The centerpiece is a new production of Josephine, Tom Cipullo’s one-act monodrama by based on the life of the legendary singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who found fame and success in France as an artist, a French Resistance hero, and a civil rights activist after escaping racism in America.
“Josephine tells a story that resonates with all of us today,” comments artistic director Mina Miller, “a story about a woman with the courage to fight back against prejudice and discrimination, and stand up for her art and ideals to make a difference in the world.” Starring soprano Laquita Mitchell in the title role, the production is directed by Erich Parce and conducted by Geoffrey Larson.
Also a highlight will be the world premiere of Wertheim Park, a setting of the poetry of Susan de Sola by composer Lori Laitman, which was commissioned by MOR. Soprano Alisa Jordheim interprets this haunting song, a deeply moving elegy for the Dutch Jews lost to the Holocaust.
In addition, the program includes chamber works by two Holocaust-era composers. Erwin Schulhoff’s virtuosic Concertino for Flute, Viola and Double Bass showcases two of the Seattle Symphony’s principal chairs, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi and flautist Demarre McGill, along with double bassist Jonathan Green. The concert opens with the elegiac Lamento for viola and piano by Dutch composer Max Vredenburg. Vredenburg sought haven in the Dutch East Indies only to endure years of captivity there under Japanese occupation; Schulhoff perished in a Nazi prison camp.
MOR’s stellar instrumental ensemble, drawn from the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, features flutist Demarre McGill, clarinetist Laura DeLuca, violinist Mikhail Shmidt, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, cellist Walter Gray, double bassist Jonathan Green, and pianists Jessica Choe and Mina Miller.
Tickets and Information: https://www.musicofremembrance.org/concert/concert-josephine
For a quarter century now, MOR remembers the Holocaust through music and honors the resilience of all people excluded or persecuted for their faith, nationality, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. In addition to rediscovering and performing music from the Holocaust, MOR has commissioned and premiered more than 30 new works by some of today’s leading composers, drawing on the Holocaust’s lessons to address urgent questions for our own time.
Lamento (1953)
Max Vredenburg
Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola
Jessica Choe, piano
Wertheim Park (2022)
Music by Lori Laitman Poetry by Susan de Sola
World Premiere
Commissioned by Music of Remembrance
Alisa Jordheim, soprano
Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Jonathan Green, double bass; Mina Miller, piano
Concertino for Flute, Viola and Double Bass (1925)
Erwin Schulhoff
Demarre McGill, flute; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Jonathan Green, double bass
Josephine (2016)
Music and Libretto by Tom Cipullo
A Monodrama in One Scene
Laquita Mitchell, soprano
Music of Remembrance Instrumental Ensemble
DeMarre McGill, flute; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Walter Gray, cello;
Jessica Choe, piano
Geoffrey Larson, conductor
Erich Parce, director
Peter Crompton, media designer
Filed under: music news, Music of Remembrance
May 10, 2022 • 4:42 pm Comments Off on World Premiere of Tres minutos
New from the Seattle-Based Music of Remembrance:
On Sunday, May 15 at 5:30 pm, Music of Remembrance returns to Benaroya Hall for its final live concert of the season. The program, titled Tres minutos, features the world premiere of a compelling new opera of that title by composer Nicolas Benavides and librettist Marella Martin Koch.
Commissioned by MOR, Tres minutos explores the intimate human dimensions of an urgent issue for our time. It tells the story of Nila and Diego, a sister and brother who share family bonds, but not citizenship. Allowed a brief supervised reunion at the border that separates them, they wrestle with questions of identity, duty and belonging. The work is a timely reminder that beyond the arguments about immigration policy are actual people with real lives, deep emotions and complicated relationships.
“Tres minutos comes at such an important time in our country,” remarks composer Nicolas Benavides, “a time when we have a refugee crisis and we have the choice to make it better or make it worse.” Starring soprano Vanessa Isiguen and baritone José Rubio in a production conceived and directed by Erich Parce and conducted by the composer.
The program includes chamber works by two composers who spoke out through their art in the darkest of times. Hans Krása, murdered in Auschwitz, is perhaps best known for his iconic children’s opera Brundibár that was performed 55 times by casts of young prisoners in the Terezín concentration camp. His Theme with Variations for string quartet was played by inmates in Terezin in a performance that was exploited by the Nazis for their infamous propaganda film “The Führer Gives a City to the Jews.” Géza Frid, in mortal danger as a stateless Jew in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, organized clandestine house concerts and was active in the underground as a forger of coupons and identity cards. Frid’s Podium Suite, featuring violinist Mikhail Shmidt and pianist Jessica Choe, is an explosion of fireworks — dramatic, virtuosic and rhythmically intense.
Performing as MOR instrumental ensemble are musicians from the Seattle Symphony Orchestra: clarinetist Laura DeLuca, violinists Mikhail Shmidt and Natasha Bazhanov, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, cellist Walter Gray, double bassist Jonathan Green, and pianist Jessica Choe.
tickets available here
PROGRAM:
Theme with Variations (1936) Hans Krása
Mikhail Shmidt, violin Natasha Bazhanov, violin
Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola Walter Gray, cello
Podium Suite, Op. 3 (1928) Géza Frid
Mikhail Shmidt, violin
Jessica Choe, piano
****
Tres minutos
Music by Nicolas Lell Benavides
Libretto by Marella Martin Koch
WORLD PREMIERE COMMISSIONED BY MUSIC OF REMEMBRANCE
More on the creative team:
Nicolas Lell Benavides’ music has been praised for finding “…a way to sketch complete characters in swift sure lines…” (Anne Midgette, Washington Post) and cooking up a “jaunty score [with] touches of cabaret, musical theater and Latin dance.” (Tim Smith, OPERA NEWS). He has worked with groups such as the Washington National Opera, The Glimmerglass Festival, New Opera West, West Edge Opera, Nashville Opera, Shreveport Opera, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Friction Quartet, Khemia Ensemble, and Nomad Session. He was a fellow at the Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. Nicolas was the first ever Young Artist Composer in Residence at The Glimmerglass Festival and has been a fellow at the Del Mar International Composers Symposium. He premiered a new opera for Washington National Opera called Pepito with librettist Marella Martin Koch. Nicolas and Marella were selected as the recipient of West Edge Opera’s Aperture commission to develop an evening length opera about civil rights icon Dolores Huerta. He is also developing an opera with librettist Laura Barati as part of MassOpera’s New Opera Workshop. Other notable projects include a new dance piece called On Trac|< for The Glimmerglass Festival in collaboration with dancer Amanda Castro, Little Cloud for Khemia Ensemble, a new string quartet for Fry Street Quartet, and a new orchestra work for Gabriela Lena Frank’s Composing Earth initiative with support from New Music USA. Nicolas has studied at Santa Clara University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.
http://www.nicolasbenavides.com
Marella Martin Koch is a librettist and director originally from Los Angeles. In addition to Tres minutos, she wrote the 20-minute opera Pepito with composer Nicolas Lell Benavides for Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative. Since its Kennedy Center premiere, Pepito has been performed across the country, recorded as a cast album “full of nuance and emotional pull” (Chris Ruel, Operawire), and released by New Opera West as an “entrancing” animated short film (Claudia Kawczynska, The Bark). Her and Nicolas’ upcoming full-length opera Dolores won the inaugural West Edge Opera Aperture Commission. Other notable credits as librettist include Ten Minutes in the Life or Death of… (music by Tyler J. Rubin), lauded as “quizzical and wonderstruck” (Steven Winn, SF Classical Voice) at West Edge Opera’s Snapshot 2021; and Elinor & Marianne (music by Aferdian), an original concept album inspired by Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility produced by The Rally Cat with support from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, City Council, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Currently based in NYC, she teaches theatre and writing to middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate students and is developing a full-length play called Friend Animals with Midnight Oil Collective. With over a decade of experience in non-profit arts administration and production, she founded and leads the multidisciplinary opera/theatre company The Rally Cat.
MFA, NYU/Tisch. BA, UC Berkeley.
http://www.marellamartinkoch.com
Filed under: music news, Music of Remembrance
November 4, 2019 • 11:37 am Comments Off on Music That Matters from MOR: Responding to Intolerance
Mikhail Shmidt, Takumi Taguchi, Walter Gray, and Susan Gulkis Assad (quartet, l to r) with José Rubio as narrator in Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Passage”; photo (c) Ben VanHouten
Music of Remembrance (MOR) opened its 22nd season yesterday afternoon at Nordstrom Recital Hall with a characteristically challenging program that included two world premieres.
MOR’s mission to remember the Holocaust through music is by no means limited to a focus on the past. Founded by artistic director and pianist Mina Miller, MOR has actually proved to be ahead of its time in grappling with issues of social justice and persecution.
Commissions in recent years have become, alarmingly, more and more topical. Confronting intolerance and its destructive consequences remains an urgent struggle in our troubled era, when anti-Semitism is on the rise, targeting of refugees and immigrants is condoned by those in power, and the tools of social media amplify the same hate- and fear-fueled ideologies that motivated the Nazis.
In 2017, MOR premiered Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s Snow Falls for violin, piano, and narrator, a work that addresses the horror of nuclear war — inspired by MOR’s Voices of Witness project that has confronted the experience of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Sunday’s concert presented MOR’s second Sakamoto commission: Passage, scored for string quartet and narrator.
Though brief, this single-movement piece seems to cover a vast emotional landscape. It unfolds as an elliptical drama, a miniature epic recounting one person’s ordeal as he was forced to flee his native Egypt and find refuge in Germany.
The composer/actor/producer/peace activitist Sakamoto, who was not present but shared his thoughts via a pre-recorded video, explained that he had befriended a young Egyptian, Kareem Lofty, on Facebook and wanted to commemorate this man’s experiences during the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Lofty’s words formed the text read by narrator José Rubio to the accompaniment of a string quartet.
Comprising the quartet, Mikhail Shmidt, Takumi Taguchi, Susan Gulkis Assad, and Walter Gray gave a performance that was all the more moving for its understated anguish. Beginning as a duet for cello and viola, the quartet proceeded in a kind of suspended time. Harmonies that were plaintive in their simplicity — and reminiscent of the Heiliger Dankgesangand its ancient mode in Beethoven’s Op. 132 — started and stopped, as if pausing to catch a breath.
At first I wondered whether Rubio’s voice wasn’t sufficiently amplified. But I then realized that his soft-spoken delivery was perfectly suited to Sakamoto’s musical vision. It added a subtle tension, compelling even greater focus and concentration on the horrors witnessed by Lofty as well as on the ennui of daily life as a refugee.
The other new commission was Veritas (i.e., “Truth”), a mixed-media piece by Shinji Eshima, a composer and double bassist from the Bay Area. Veritas expands on an earlier piece, in which Shinji fashioned a duet for cello and double bass from J.S. Bach’s Second Suite in D minor for solo cello, with a visual dimension.
Walter Gray and Jonathan Green in Shinji Eshima’s “Veritas”, with media design by Kate Duhamel of sculptures by Al Farrow; image (c) Ben VanHouten
Kate Duhamel‘s video displaying images from the American sculptor Al Farrow‘s Vandalized Doors series was projected as Walter Gray and Jonathan Green played the multi-movement Suite, famously characterized by Pablo Casals as “tragic.” (His tags for each of the other Suites (Nos. 1 and 3-6) were, respectively: “optimistic,” “heroic,” “grandiose,” “tempestuous,” and “bucolic.”) The musical idea seemed to be to embody, in another instrument, one of the (many) other voices implied by Bach’s illusionistic polyphony — to “liberate” and amplify it.
But it wasn’t until around the middle of the piece that Eshima’s additional double bass voice really opened up a new perspective on Bach’s score for me, when it seemed to start following an “alternative” path. The two musicians’ doubling of the flowing line of the final Gigue was a virtuosic tour de force.
The Farrow images, on the other hand, were mesmerizing, haunting, and disturbing all at once. Farrow used weapons and munitions — some more easily recognizable than others, like bullets and machine guns — to construct giant doors to a mosque, a church, and a synagogue. Some of the images included defacements of the sacred spaces, such as a spray-painted swastika — candid images of intolerance all too commonplace even today. Eshima was quoted in the program as viewing Farrow to be “the Picasso of our time,” noting: “He creates visual Truth out of guns and bullets without making any judgments. Experiencing his art allows one to discover one’s own Truth.”
A duet for violin and piano by the Dallas-based, Indian-Israeli composer Simon Sargon opened the program: the mystical musical prayer Before the Ark, with Mina Miller accompanying Takumi Taguchi from the keyboard. The violinist drew silky, muted tones from his instrument to frame the piece with a reverential aura.
Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Walter Gray, cello; Jonathan Green, double bass; and Jessica Choe, piano; with Karen Early Evans and Erich Parce; photo (c) Ben VanHouten
Concluding the concert was the cycle Camp Songs by Paul Schoenfield — an earlier MOR commission from 2001 that was a finalist for the Music Pulitzer. Camp Songs has had an impressive afterlife since MOR premiered it in 2002.
Written for a chamber ensemble (Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Walter Gray, cello; Jonathan Green, double bass; and Jessica Choe, piano) and two singers, the cycle was here presented for the first time in a new staging conceived and directed by Erich Parce (who also directed memorable productions of MOR’s two commissions from Tom Cipullo, Afterlife and last spring’s The Parting). Parce himself performed the baritone role, joined by soprano Karen Early Evans.
Schoenfield built Camp Songs from music and poetry by the Polish journalist Aleksander Kulisiewicz (1918-1982), who was incarcerated for nearly six years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Making music with fellow prisoners was his means of resistance — and at the same time served to record and document the unbelievable atrocities that were now part of everyday life. “In the camp, I tried to create verses that would serve as
direct poetical reportage. I used my memory as a living
archive. Friends came to me and dictated their songs,” Kulisiewicz later recalled. The Kulisiewicz Collection can now be found in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Camp Songs comprises five of these texts, whose tone of bitter, hard-edged satire is evident from the opening depiction of a kapo, “Black Boehm,” who sings enthusiastically of his position as a crematorium worker. Parce’s stark staging amplified the grim litany of beatings, humiliations, and cruelty. The chamber ensemble’s impassioned playing ratcheted the irony to an almost unbearable level.
Review (c) 2019 Thomas May. All rights reserved
Filed under: commissions, Holocaust, Music of Remembrance
May 16, 2019 • 10:18 am Comments Off on The Parting: New Opera by Tom Cipullo and David Mason at MOR
Miklós Radnóti
Here’s a Seattle Times preview of the upcoming world premiere of the new opera The Parting by Tom Cipullo and David Mason this Sunday.
The Parting is set during the final evening the poet Miklós Radnóti spends with his wife Fanni Gyarmati before he is sent into forced labor during the Holocaust. It’s the second commission from this team by Music of Rembrance, following their remarkable opera After Life four years ago.
When Mina Miller founded Seattle-based Music of Remembrance in 1998, she could hardly have foreseen that its mission would become even more distressingly relevant over two decades later…
Filed under: commissions, Holocaust, Music of Remembrance, new music, new opera
May 9, 2018 • 9:37 am Comments Off on Gaman at Music of Remembrance
I had the privilege of interviewing Shokichi Tokita for my latest Seattle Times story. As a boy of 8, he was incarcerated with his entire family at the infamous Minidoka”War Relocation Center” in Idaho soon after Pearl Harbor.
Filed under: Music of Remembrance, Seattle Times
May 22, 2017 • 3:07 pm 2
Mary Kouyoumdjian, composer. Photo credit: Dominica Eriksen
Last night’s Spring Concert presented by Music of Remembrance (MOR) featured the world premiere of an extraordinary collaboration: to open myself, to scream, a portrait piece inspired by the Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), with music by Mary Kouyoumdjian and visual design by Kevork Mourad.
The entire concert, titled Ceija, and presented at Benaroya’s Nordstrom Recital Hall, was dedicated to the legacy of this Roma artist, writer, and musician who survived three concentration camps — though many members from her extended family did not.
Born to Catholic parents, Stojka traveled during summers with her Roma family across the Austrian countryside as a child — the family business involved horse trading — while they wintered in Vienna.
Only 12 by war’s end, Ceija Stojka took decades before she could even begin processing these traumatic memories through her painting and writing. (She was 55 when she began painting.) But she gained a following, also publishing a trio of autobiographies that broke ground in addressing the issue of the Nazi genocide of the Roma people — whose persecution hardly ended with the war. Vienna named a square inStojka’s honor following her death in 2013.
Kouyoumdjian is a young Brooklyn-based composer who has been commissioned by such distinguished ensembles as the Kronos Quartet. In previous works she has addressed experiences of the Armenian genocide and the chaos of war, which directly affected her family.
This commission is very much in keeping with MOR’s commitment, in the words of founder and artistic director Mina Miller, to remind us of “the Holocaust’s urgent lessons for today, and of the need for vigilance and action in the face of threats to human rights everywhere.” MOR friends Marcus and Pat Meier, longstanding advocates for and collectors of Stojka’s art, had brought the artist’s story to Miller’s attention and sponsored the new commission.
Kouyoumdjian took her title from a speech Stojka gave in 2004 for the opening of a retrospective at Vienna’s Jewish Museum: “I reached for the pen because I had to open myself, to scream.”
Each of the four movements of to open myself, to scream is also titled after quotes from the artist. Kouyoumdjian says that she was drawn to Stojka’s “themes of longing for the past and coping with the aftermath of unimaginable trauma,” adding, “I hope to continue the conversation about how we sympathize with those who experience the unimaginable, and how we can pull from the past to move forward.”
That’s a tall order for any work, but Kouyoumdjian succeeds brilliantly in drawing us sympathetically into Stojka’s world. She makes us sense precisely these themes of longing and coping through art. What’s more, she does this without sentimental manipulation or a false glaze promising aesthetic redemption.
to open myself, to scream creates a bold, innovative soundspace using techniques of layering and multiple forms of dialogue among its unusual chamber configuration of clarinet, trumpet, violin, cello, and double bass (all played by Seattle Symphony musicians).
The most overt musical dialogue is between present and past. The players interact with an electronic soundtrack that samples and processes material they had previously recorded; Kouyoumdjian also recorded vocal samples representing Stojka’s memories of her mother comforting her (she was in the camps with her daughter) — but these are filtered and distanced, so that the comfort offered always seems just beyond the horizon.
Overall, the effect is of a labyrinthine internal dialogue, a dialogue poised restlessly between contradictory impulses. The narrative framework implies a desire to revisit happy memories of childhood (evident particularly in folk-flavored idioms), which are accompanied and superseded by the trauma to which these are inevitably linked. Kouyoumdjian’s continually transforming soundscape conveys this harrowed consciousness, whose very sensitivity enhances the pain of memory.
Another significant dialogue is the one between music and visuals. The latter, working with the whole spectrum of Stojka’s paintings and ink sketches, were designed by Syrian-Armenian artist Kevork Mourad (a multi-media master who has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project among many others).
Projected onto a large screen behind the players, the paintings are animated into a filmic accompaniment to the score (rather than the conventional order of the reverse). Mourad’s remarkable animations underscore the music’s sense of memories and images being unrelentingly processed. In turn they establish their own varieties of dialogue and interchange: between figuration and abstraction, saturated colors and somber black-and-white, recognizability and ambiguity.
Particular figures are seen moving into or receding from the foreground. At times the “action” creates an illusion of the paintings trying to breathe, which anticipates one of Kouyoumdjian’s most startling gestures, at the end of her score. In conjunction, music and visuals reinforce the feeling of a struggle between the past and “moving forward.” A kind of anxious pedal point grounds many of the musical gestures, even at their most frenzied, until the piece ultimately builds to an overwhelming, unresolved climax.
What’s especially innovative here is the sense of emotional pulse Kouyoumdjian establishes: never linear or straightforward but always in motion, acting and reacting. The last movement is titled after one of Stojka’s most unforgettable statements: “Auschwitz is only sleeping. If the world does not change now … then I cannot explain why I survived …”
MOR’s program also presented the world premiere of new choreography by Olivier Wevers, artistic director o Seattle’s Whim W’Him company. The music was from Osvaldo Golijov’s score to the 2000 film The Man Who Cried, which depicts the story of a Roma man and his lover, a young Jewish woman, in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Featuring dancers Liane Aung and Karl Watson, Wevers’ choreography emphasized the passionate urgency of the lovers’ bond, their individuality facing powerful destructive forces. The sextet of SSO musicians gave a poetically touching account of Golijov’s music, with its blend of klezmer and Roma-folk elements.
The program also included a number of works by composers who either fled or fell victim to the Nazis. SSO violinist Mikhail Shmidt and pianist Jessica Choe offered a bit of needed relief between the emotionally gripping premieres: a dazzling performance of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 1949 Rhapsody on Moldavian themes, populist and wildly mercurial.
The first, relatively lighter half of the program included a nostalgic reverie of old Vienna in Karl Weigle’s Revelation for string quintet and Hans Gál’s Schubert-inflected Variations on a Viennese Melody, a youthful work from 1914.
Vocal music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who fled Europe to become a legendary Hollywood composer, filled out the rest of the program. Catherine Cook‘s lush, resonant mezzo soprano was perfectly tailored to the arrangement (for piano quintet) of “Mariettas Lied” from Korngold’s 1920 opera Die tote Stadt.
While Hitler was in power, Korngold refused to write concert music or opera and turned to film music. One near-casualty of his career after fleeing the Nazis was a series of songs set to Shakespeare texts, some of which were lost when the family estate was confiscated; fortunately the composer was able to recreate them from memory in his new home in Los Angeles. With Mina Miller at the keyboard, Cook sang four of these, including Korngold’s folk-simple but piquant version of Desdemona’s “Willow Song.”
On May 24 MOR will perform Kouyoumdjian’s to open myself, to scream at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The rest of the program will include music by Hans Krása, Betty Olivero, and Lori Laitman.
(c) 2017 Thomas May. All rights reserved.
Filed under: American music, commissions, Music of Remembrance, review
May 16, 2017 • 1:19 pm Comments Off on Music of Remembrance’s Latest Program Is Also Music of Our Time
Stojka, Ceija. “Hiding”. Courtesy of Pat and Marcus Meier
My story for The Seattle Times on Music of Remembrance’s latest commission (details on the concert here):
Mary Kouyoumdjian’s to open myself, to scream, inspired by Roma artist and Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka, is at the center of MOR’s May 21 program. “Our mission is to speak out for oppressed people,” says MOR founder Mina Miller.
Filed under: commissions, Music of Remembrance, new music, Seattle Times
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 