Music of Remembrance - Remembering Holocaust Musicians

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MUSIC CAPTURES LIFE AMID HORROR OF DEATH CAMPS
- Emily Russin, The Seattle Times, April 2003

"An Unsilenced Music," the final concert of Music of Remembrance’s fifth season, commemorated the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising with music both sublime and satirical. During the evening’s five works, each of which was composed or inspired by victims of the Holocaust, a memorial candle flickered from a table onstage.

Following a setting of Maurice Ravel’s Kaddish (passionately sung by mezzo-soprano Julie Mirel), Seattle Symphony members Mikhail Shmidt, Jeannie Wells Yablonsky, Susan Gulkis Assadi and Roberta Downey performed "Fantasy and Fugue for String Quartet" by Gideon Klein. Tragically, Klein was only 26 when he died working in the coal mines at Furstengrube. The quartet, which Klein composed while an inmate at Terezin in 1942, moved between bleak fits of frenzy and gentle, impressionistic lulls and showcased the players’ rich, complementary tones.

The mood lightened after the Klein, as violinist Leonid Keylin took on Joseph Achron’s klezmer-inspired "Stempenyu Suite." Keylin really let loose in the rousing third dance - a mini-showpiece full of tricky plucking and slurred staccato bowing.

Lori Laitman’s eagerly anticipated art song "Fathers" highlighted the poetry of Anne Ranasinghe, one of Sri Lanka’s only Jewish citizens, and the deceased Russian poet David Vogel with a baritone (Erich Parce) and piano trio (Yablonsky, Amos Yang and Mina Miller). Laitman’s attention to the poetry of mourning came through in Parce’s sonorous voice. And while Seattle Symphony newcomer and cellist Yang stood out in his first MOR outing, the resulting counterpoint between words and notes left a somewhat murky tangle for the listener to unravel.

Later, in one of the season’s most dynamic chamber groupings, a dream team made up of Shmidt, Keylin, Assadi, Eric Kean, Yang and Downey assembled for Erwin Schulhoff’s "Sextet for Strings." A haunting three-note motif was exchanged through four moody movements until a final, resounding silence fell.

In "Terezin Cabaret: Songs and Satire," Mirel and Parce teamed up with Miller for a rollicking yet horrific look inside the Czech fortress that held artists, writers and musicians before they were sent to death camps. A projector flashed etchings by Terezin inhabitants above the stage while the 11 jaunty songs, all of which were composed and performed inside the fortress at the Nazis’ request, contained startling humor in the face of unimaginable terror. The effect of being entertained by songs that distracted Terezin’s prisoners from their fates was equally powerful and devastating.

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