Mina's Corner

Our fourteenth season has begun with a packed fall, including two concerts and the world premiere of our documentary The Boys of Terezín.

 

Our concert at the Seattle Art Museum on October 1 opened this season’s Sparks of Glory series—free public concerts in the community that often link our music with themes from the other arts. For this event, we explored connections with SAM’s intriguing “Our National Game” exhibit and its examination of baseball as a mirror of challenges in American life.  The audience heard the song-cycle version of Lori Laitman’s Vedem, based on the poetry that a group of courageous teenagers created for their secret journal in the Terezín concentration camp. We also performed a string quartet by the young Pavel Haas, a gifted Czech composer who would later be deported to Terezín and murdered in Auschwitz.

 

We want these free performances to reach everyone, especially people who can’t easily attend chamber music concerts, so it was gratifying to receive a thank-you afterward from ten residents of the Council House assisted-living facility.

 

Then, on October 30, came the world premiere of The Boys of Terezín at the Seattle Art Museum. The film tells a story that’s important for all generations, but especially for young people. Thanks to a generous gift from Stan and Michele Rosen, we were able to offer free admittance to students, and many of them were part of the packed audience. Five teenagers who appeared in the film as members of the Northwest Boychoir joined producer John Sharify onstage for a post-screening Q&A. Nobody could have failed to be moved by these youngsters’ eloquent accounts of how learning the Vedem oratorio, and meeting the surviving “boys of Terezín,” had changed their lives.  

 

Recently The Boys of Terezín was shown at the Australia Jewish Film Festival in Sydney and Melbourne. In early December it will be the showcase opening event at the Palm Beach (Florida) Jewish Film Festival, and in January it will be screened at the Miami Jewish Film Festival. We’re hoping the film will be shown around the world. We’ve also produced a 15-minute educational version for classroom use. If you’re an educator or student, we’d love to hear how we can bring it to your school.

 

Our mainstage season opened with our Kristallnacht commemoration concert on November 7, featuring the West Coast premiere of What a Life!, the satiric bilingual revue that Austrian-born composer Hans Gál created and staged for the entertainment of his fellow prisoners in a British detention camp on the Isle of Man. Gál was one of the thousands of recent refugees, including many Jews, to be interned by wartime authorities as “enemy aliens.” Philippa Kiraly wrote in her review:

 

What’s astounding is Gál’s . . . upbeat attitude. The songs are irreverent, ironic, rueful, and funny as they skewer camp life. As well as singing, [director Erich] Parce gave it a light staging, so that a six-foot stretch of wire with barbs appears for the “Barbed Wire Song” (“Why are human beings behind wire?”), and a folding single bed arrives for the two singers in “Song of the Double Bed” with humorous consequences on stage (though they probably weren’t at the time). From the diary excerpts, read by actor Kurt Beattie, we find that the row of beachside hotels commandeered for the camp housed 72 inmates per house. Gál was only in the camp about 19 weeks, but this clever, amusing, and truthful revue with its charming music hits home.

 

We continue the season’s theme–“Music Behind Barbed Wire”–in our May 2012 concert with the world premiere of Another Sunrise, a new MOR commission from composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, the creators of our 2007 commission For a Look or a Touch. You’ll learn about the tumultuous struggle of Krystyna Zywulska – Auschwitz inmate, resistance fighter, poet and memoirist. Soprano Caitlin Lynch—who recently appeared with Seattle Opera as Micäela in Carmen—will create the role of Krystyna in this theatrical song cycle. We can hardly wait to hear what Jake and Gene have in store!

 

Mina Miller, Artistic Director