Music of Remembrance - Remembering Holocaust Musicians

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IMPOSING PERFORMANCES FOR A HAUNTING COMPOSITION
- Melinda Bargreen, The Seattle Times, November 2003

How does a composer create music to express the inexpressible? That was the task that lay before composer Marc Neikrug in 1979-80 when he completed his music-theater piece “Through Roses.”

This work, given its Northwest premiere Sunday evening in Seattle’s Music of Remembrance series, is an extended meditation – a sort of living nightmare – by a lone actor (the excellent John Rubinstein), as he revisits his experiences as a violinist in Auschwitz.

Accompanying his unstilled memories is an eight-piece instrumental ensemble whose members play snippets of the waltzes, marches and solo violin pieces the central character was forced to play, as other death-camp inmates were beaten or incinerated.

These searing memories are also evoked in a musical language full of insistent, sometimes shrilly high-pitched woodwinds and eerie string sounds, punctuated by an array of percussion, and by powerful and complex chords from the piano. These sounds just won’t let go of our protagonist, try though he might to shout them down.

Rubinstein uses bitter irony, macabre humor, understatement and raw emotion to convey the horrors that took place in the camp, including the heart-wrenching episode that provides the work’s title.

Neikrug, who conducted the performance, drew imposing performances from the ensemble, including some of the region’s finest musicians (Mikhail Shmidt, Susan Gulkis Assadi, Amos Yang, Laura DeLuca, Nathan Hughes, Scott Goff, Matthew Kocmieroski and Craig Sheppard).

It’s a powerful piece. Whether this combination of piercing atonality and fleeting pastiche (including brief quotes from the Haydn string quartet from which the “Deutschland Über Alles” anthem was taken) can express the experience and significance of Auschwitz is another matter. Maybe – and perhaps thankfully – there is no music sufficient to recreate that horror.

Sunday’s program was dedicated to the memory of the late Seattle cellist David Tonkonogui (a frequent performer on this series). It opened with an exquisite performance by fellow Seattle Symphony cellist Yang, whose lovely, lyrical sound gave a wonderful gravity to the “Passacaille” of Szymon Laks (with pianist and series founder Mina Miller).

Miller and Yang also joined violinist Leonid Keylin in a bold, outgoing performance of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Piano Trio No. 2, a work of modest musical merit but substantial charm.

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