At our Saturday afternoon Sparks of Glory outreach series, we greet our loyal friends and meet new audience members. This season, MOR performs at the downtown Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and at Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center (GSC). At these free concerts-with-commentary, Mina Miller―MOR artistic director, pianist, and international speaker on musicians’ resistance during the Holocaust―shares her insights on each piece and her passion for preserving this precious cultural legacy through performance and education. This season’s two programs at the Seattle Art Museum are linked with the museum’s permanent gallery exhibit Burden of History, a provocative exploration of the uses of visual imagery to communicate the emotional impact of war and oppression.

Camp Songs October 10, 2009 2:00 p.m. (SAM)

Paul Schoenfield’s searing Camp Songs conveys the irony and brilliantly mordant humor of journalist Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a Polish journalist and political dissident who composed poems and songs while imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.  You’ll also hear Ernest Bloch’s meditative and deeply soulful Prayer for double bass, and the stirring Duo for violin and cello that Gideon Klein composed shortly before his deportation to Terezín.    

 

Ernest Bloch
Prayer                                                            

 

Gideon Klein
Duo                                                                

 

Paul Schoenfield (commissioned by Music of Remembrance)
Camp Songs (English version)

 

Unconquered! December 5, 2009 2:00 p.m. (GSC)

The Nazi propaganda machine attempted to portray Terezín as a model ghetto that demonstrated the Third Reich's humane treatment of the Jews. In reality, inmates passed through Terezín on their way to the death camps--or succumbed there to starvation or disease. Remarkably, the musicians and composers imprisoned there never ceased creating. You'll hear Gideon Klein's vibrant, melodic Trio, written just nine days before his transport to Auschwitz, and the wit and satire of Terezin's cabaret songs. The audaciously original Erwin Schulhoff was sent not to Terezín but to a camp in Bavaria, where he perished in 1942. Schulhoff--banned as “degenerate” by the Nazi regime--united dance, jazz, and folk song melodies in the string quartets that are only now gaining the recognition they merit.

Gideon Klein
Trio                                                                

 

Erwin Schulhoff
String Quartet No. 2                

 

Fathers  March 13, 2010 2:00 p.m. (GSC)

Acclaimed contemporary composer Lori Laitman drew on the Holocaust poetry of Sri Lankan poet Anne Ranasinghe and Russian poet David Vogel for her song cycle Fathers, a work that explores the father-child relationship through the words of poets whose fathers were murdered by the Nazis.  Bloch’s Baal Shem is a deeply touching musical portrait of Chassidic life.  Erwin Schulhoff’s sparkling Duo bears the influence of Leos Janácek, to whom it is dedicated. 

 

Ernest Bloch
Baal Shem (Three Pictures of Chassidic Life)                                       

 

Erwin Schulhoff
Duo

 

Lori Laitman
Fathers      

 

 

 

 

Rodas Recordada April 17, 2010 2:00 p.m. (SAM)

Canadian composer Sid Robinovich’s Rodas Recordada relates a story that the Spanish poet Guillermo Díaz-Plaja told about his encounters with the Sephardic community of Rhodes before and after its destruction by the Nazis.  The moving ballad has revealed an unexpected arc of history reaching from Greece to Seattle.  Lior Navok’s Found in a Train Station is based on a note that a mother pinned to her child before she boarded a train to a concentration camp. You’ll also hear the haunting sounds of Simon Sargon’s Before the Ark for violin and piano, and the ethereal, poignant beauty of Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae.

 

 

Sid Robinovich
Rodas Recordada                                           

 

Lior Navok
Found in a Train Station

 

Osvaldo Golijov
Tenebrae