By Gregory Berg

Jake Heggie: For a Look or a Touch. Morgan Smith, Erich Parce, baritone; Julian Patrick, actor; Amos Yang, Julian Schwarz, cello; Zart Domburian-Eby, flute; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Craig Sheppard, Mina Miller, piano. (Naxos 8.559379; 60:50)

Heggie: For a Look or a Touch: "Prelude: Do You Remember?" "The Voice," "Golden Years," "The Story of Joe," "Silence," "Der singende Wald," "Remember." Lori Laitman: The Seed of Dreams: "I Lie in This Coffin," "A Load of Shoes," "To My Child," "Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars," "No Sad Songs Please." Gerard Schwarz: In Memoriam.

Seattle-based Music of Remembrance was founded just over ten years ago by pianist Mina Miller to honor the memory of those lost in the Holocaust by preserving their music and presenting it to modern audiences. The group also has commissioned new compositions around various Holocaust-related themes, including many settings of texts from the Holocaust. As moving as it is to hear songs from the Holocaust, there is something equally poignant and inspiring when a text from the era that might easily have been lost to us is instead given new and lasting life when wed to a newly crafted musical setting. In many cases, the texts are intensely private and personal cries of anguish or defiance that were never intended for the public, and in some instances the texts are not poetry at all (in the common sense of word), and might not amount to anything more than simple scrawling on a wall or scrap of paper. One scarcely can imagine how those doomed writers would react if told that in the next century their words would inspire the composition of new and moving musical masterworks.

Two such compositions grace this disk, each a powerful addition to the repertoire. Jake Heggie's song cycle For a Look or a Touch centers on the persecution, not of Jews, but rather gays during the Holocaust, an atrocity authorized under an infamous statute known as Paragraph 175. The composer tells us in his program notes that when he was approached by Music of Remembrance to fashion a work that would speak to Nazi persecution of gays, he was horrified to find what he called "a vast silence" where he expected to find a rich abundance of writing by gays. One likely reason for this was that homosexuality was against the law in Germany until 1970, and to write openly about it-and especially about one's own homosexuality-was exceedingly difficult and dangerous. Heggie's breakthrough came when he was able to see the documentary film Paragraph 175, which included the testimony of several elderly Holocaust survivors who were gay, speaking publicly about their experience for the first time. One of them was Gad Beck, still alive at the writing of this article, whose teenage lover was murdered at Auschwitz. Shortly after seeing the film, Heggie found the essential catalyst for this work in the journal of Gad's young lover, Manfred Lewin. Heggie called upon frequent collaborator Gene Scheer to fashion what he calls the "libretto" of this song cycle from Lewin's eloquent and heartfelt journal, and the result is a brilliantly conceived exploration of what it meant to be young and gay in 1936 Berlin, and what it was like to have that carefree life brutally torn apart by the Nazis.

The song cycle depicts Gad as a lonely, elderly man who is stunned one night by the ghostly reappearance of Manfred, looking as young and handsome as when they were lovers more than half a century earlier. Gad is a speaking role while Manfred is a baritone, and the accompaniment is a small instrumental ensemble of piano, flute, clarinet, violin, and cello which has sufficient heft for the climaxes, yet a sense of intimacy for the quietest moments as well. Actually, the term "accompaniment" is a misnomer, for the instrumentalists play a far more crucial role than that by creating an atmosphere of aching melancholy in the prelude and then a swirl of contrasting moods and images through the course of the songs that follow. The basic scenario is not particularly startling or groundbreaking, but it is executed flawlessly in Scheer's sensitive libretto and Heggie's richly expressive music.

The work opens with a hushed, throbbing restlessness, indicative of another sleepless night for Gad. The sudden appearance of the ghost of Manfred is accompanied by a plaintive refrain in which he sings "Do you remember? Do you remember when night was for more than sleep?" Gad is pained at the thought of reliving those painful events from sixty years earlier, but the ghost of Manfred persists and his story unfolds in the songs that follow. Such a work could so easily be cast in unbroken gray, but Heggie and Scheer wisely include a saucy song called "Golden Years," which conveys the raucous, reckless energy and joy of the Schwanenberg in Berlin, where they spent so many memorable nights together. There are shades of Bernstein and Gershwin in this remarkable song about the intoxicating sense of freedom which they had in their courtship and of the chance to "meet and greet and eat and cheat and swing" in this Berlin hot spot. Tellingly, Manfred also sings about the times when they would shout "Police!" and watch their fellow patrons scatter in fear; tragically, as Gad recalls, there was a night when the police really did come and those joyous days and nights were no more.

From there, the cycle takes us through a progression of deepening pain and anguish. "The Story of Joe" graphically recounts the arrest and murder of a friend of Manfred's, and those who witnessed the savage deed are almost as sickened by their own helplessness and silence as they are by the deed itself. And when Gad finally brings himself to ask Manfred whatever became of him, he sings of "Der singende Wald" (The Singing Forest) where the singing referred to in the title is actually the cries and screams of those who have been taken into those woods to be tortured and killed. Heggie sets the text brilliantly by giving the music an eerie sense of lilt and grace, as though it were a once lovely song that has been twisted into something unbearably painful, "beyond comprehension," as Manfred sings in the song's hushed final measures. The final song finds Manfred and Gad back where they began, with the return of the plaintive refrain about remembering, and Gad finally admits to Manfred and to himself that he remembers everything about what they shared, both the ecstasy and the agony. At the end, the two of them are slowly dancing together, as Heggie's wistful music fades into nothingness.

This exquisite masterpiece is still more haunting because of the superb performance it receives here. Baritone Morgan Smith sings Manfred's songs with an approach that is both nuanced and unmannered, and his diction and musicianship are exemplary. The voice is rich and supple, and conveys both tenderness and virility. The spoken role of Gad is eloquently delivered by Julian Patrick; one wishes that this gifted baritone who has sung leading roles at the Met and elsewhere might have been given something to sing beyond a few measures of hushed humming at the close of the work. The musicians from Music of Remembrance are sensitive and loving partners.

A worthy companion to Heggie's song cycle is Lori Laitman's The Seed of Dreams, in which she sets five poems by Abraham Sutzkever, a gifted Yiddish writer who lived for years in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna, Lithuania, but who eventually managed to escape to the outside world to become a courageous member of the resistance movement in his homeland. (Most of his family did not live to escape the ghetto.) The program notes inform us that Sutzkever created a great deal of poetry, but also worked tirelessly to smuggle books and manuscripts out of the ghetto so that the artistic expressions of these courageous souls would not be swallowed up in oblivion.

Laitman has an uncommon ability to breathe new life into a text with her music without obscuring its original essence, and she demonstrates that sensitivity here to a remarkable degree. As with the aforementioned Heggie song cycle, we are treated to a wider musical palette than we might expect from such a work. "A Load of Shoes" describes Sutzkever's reaction upon seeing a cart loaded with used shoes and noticing a pair of his late mother's shoes perched on top of the pile. The music has a heavy, pesante feeling to it and a driving tempo to reflect the poet's mounting horror at the sight. "I lie in This Coffin" is a text based on the poet's real-life experience of hiding from the Nazis in a coffin and of suppressing his fear and panic with reminiscences of his late sister. Over a pulsing bass line that perhaps represents the pulse of the poet, Laitman spins a stark melodic line for the singer and a mournful countermelody in the cello which grow more agitated with Sutzkever's increasing fear. In "To My Child" Sutzkever is a heartbroken father trying to articulate the sorrow of losing his son, who was murdered by the Nazis. The text is a tortured ride through a maze of conflicting emotions and images, and Laitmans music rides the waves of those emotions without dictating their course. As the poet speaks of feeling the corpse of his child for the first time, Laitman spins out the word "cool" with a brief, subtle, yet exquisitely expressive melisma. When the text abruptly turns from sadness to anger with the words, "how can you shut your eyes, leaving me here," the music reflects that same turn, not with histrionics, but rather with quiet assurance. This is exactly what great song writing is all about.

Laitman achieves similar success in "Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars," in which she weaves her own music with that of Lithuanian composer Abraham Brudno, who also lived in the Vilna Ghetto and, unlike the poet, did not survive. His main melodic theme, which we hear first in an instrumental interlude, comes from his own setting of this same text, and the combination of Laitmans gentle music with the more vigorous music of Brudno, is an intriguing and captivating combination. The text is about longing and hope, and we are given two different faces of that through these contrasting musical fabrics, plus the contrast between the English translation of the poem and the original Yiddish words which Laitman utilizes for the song's spirited finale. The work ends radiantly with a poem about the precious power of memory, which Sutzkever wrote after escaping the ghetto and finding refuge in the woods by Lake Narocz in the winter of 1944. "No sad songs, please," the poet requests, and Laitman sets these words with touching restraint and affection.

Baritone Erich Parce sings these songs with understanding and great care, and he has invaluable collaborators in MOR founder Mina Miller at the piano and Amos Yang on cello. These three musicians achieve remarkable magic, here and these beautiful and important songs deserve nothing less.