Music of Remembrance - Remembering Holocaust Musicians

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SEATTLE
- Thomas May, Opera Now, September/October 2004

Music continues to play a critical role in confronting the unfathomable dimensions of suffering and loss encompassed in the catastrophe known as the Holocaust. Such is the tenet behind Music of Remembrance, a Seattle-based organization founded in 1998 and dedicated to giving voice to the musical witness of Holocaust composers and performers as well as to commissioning ‘new works in their spirit’. The latter part of its mission has generated compositions by American composers David Stock, Paul Schoenfield (his Camp Songs was a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer in music), and most recently, Thomas Pasatieri. Music of Remembrance presented the world premiere of Pasatieri’s song cycle Letter to Warsaw at Benaroya Hall in May.

Mina Miller, artistic director of Music of Remembrance, suggested the idea for a song cycle based on six unpublished poems by Pola Braun, a Polish cabaret artist. Braun had written them while imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto and later in the concentration camp Majdanek, where she was murdered. Astonishingly little is known about her life. Yet Bret Werb – musicologist of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC – offered a vivid portrait of her milieu in an introductory talk. Braun had worked as a poet and cabaret performer before the war. She continued working at the Sztuka café in the Warsaw Ghetto – where Wladyslaw Szpilman is portrayed performing in the film The Pianist – and even in the concentration camp where she was eventually deported, holding secret concerts in which she sang her own songs for fellow women inmates.

Known for such operas as The Seagull and The Trial of Mary Lincoln, Pasatieri is also a prolific composer of art songs and has written extensively for film (eg, Angels in America and Finding Nemo), Letter to Warsaw sets six of Braun’s poems (in English), interspersing these with six purely instrumental movements to create a capacious cycle of 70 minutes. Pasatieri faced the challenge not only of musically articulating their emotions, but of creating a unifying sound world to bind them. From the start (a song called ‘Jew”) he establishes a tone of gently paced, autumnal melancholy and an uncomplicated, conservatively oriented melodic pensiveness, calling Menotti to mind. Pasatieri’s craftsmanship is evident in the spare but emotionally resonant colours he presses from his chamber orchestra, but he seems reluctant to probe greater depths, coursing instead on the emotional momentum of Braun’s own startling poetry. Poetry and music work to exceptional effect in the song ‘Mother’ – using a touching Gluck-like gesture which threads through the cycle – and in the final and longest part, which combines Braun’s keen observations of the dehumanizing facts of “An Ordinary Day’ and “Moving Say’ with the Kaddish prayer.

Jane Eaglen – for whom Pasatieri specifically composed his cycle – was a moving advocate, despite a nasty cold from which she was previously reported to be suffering. The soprano has been developing a newfound artistic confidence of late, fully evident here (and captured on the new CD of Letter to Warsaw just released by Naxos). It was marvelous to hear the subtlety of her phrasing – and the range of colours she can deploy in the middle of her range – within the more intimate dimensions of Pasatieri’s setting. Accompanying her were musicians from the Music of Remembrance group (mostly members of the Seattle Symphony), whom Gerard Schwarz led with an ear for the cycle’s over-arching lyrical unities.

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