Music of Remembrance - Remembering Holocaust Musicians

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SEATTLE TIMES
- Melinda Bargreen
Seattle Times music critic
May 2005

A look at the program makes it immediately apparent why the small-scale Music of Remembrance series has found such a secure niche in the Seattle musical scene in the past seven years. Series director and pianist Mina Miller has taken what could have been a one-note, depressing theme--keeping alive the voices of the Holocaust--and turned it into a vibrant forum for new work, performed by some of the region's best artists.

Monday night's program, in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day, offered three world premieres and a West Coast premiere. The performers included instrumentalists and singers from the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, Northwest Sinfonietta and the University of Washington faculty.

Mina Miller, artistic director of Music of Remembrance, suggested the idea for a song cycle based on six unpublished poems by Pola Braun, a Polish cabaret artist.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.

The opening work, the new "In Memoriam" of Gerard Schwarz, marks the first Seattle performance (to this writer's knowledge) of any composition by the Seattle Symphony music director. Making it a family affair, Schwarz's young son, Julian, was the cello soloist in this work for cello and string quartet--a work that also commemorates the late cellist David Tonkonogui, Julian's first cello teacher and a member of the Symphony's cello section.

"In Memoriam" starts with an extended meditation for the cello; the string quartet enters, and the music arches upward, returning gradually to the opening theme. The music is tonal, technically assured and beautiful to hear, and Julian Schwarz played it remarkably well. The quartet, all excellent players, included violinists Jeannie Wells Yablonsky and Leonid Keylin, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi and cellist Mara Finkelstein.

Lori Laitman's "The Seed of Dream," a new song cycle inspired by the poetry of Abraham Sutzkever, featured baritone Erich Parce with cellist Amos Yang and Miller at the piano in a deeply moving performance. Laitman illuminated the heart-wrenching poems with her music; Parce's immaculate diction and rich baritone did the rest, while Yang's exquisitely played cello provided a wordless counterpoint to it all.

After this, even an excellent performance of Erwin Schulhoff's String Quartet No. 1 was a bit anticlimactic. So was a long set of Czech and German cabaret music from the Terezin concentration camp, some of it heard for the first time in new English translations by Kobi Luria. Parce and mezzo-soprano Julie Mirel, both experts at putting across a song, joined Miller for performances of mordant irony.

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