Free Concert Features Baritone Erich Parce in Vilna Ghetto Song Cycle
SEATTLE, WA—December 29, 2008—Music of Remembrance (MOR) continues its fourth season of the free Sparks of Glory outreach series on Saturday, January 31, 2009. A Vanished World will be performed at 2:00 p.m. Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center, with chamber music by Lithuanian émigré Joseph Achron (“one of the most underrated modern composers,” said Arnold Schoenberg), Egon Ledeć (associate concertmaster with the Czech Philharmonic until the German occupation), and two contemporary American composers, Lori Laitman and David Stock.
The series is supported this year by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces program, thanks in part to works MOR has commissioned from American composers in response to the Holocaust. In A Vanished World, David Stock offers a nostalgic reminiscence of shtetl life, while Lori Laitman’s song cycle, The Seed of Dream, conveys poet Abraham Sutzkever’s unyielding grip on his humanity even in the darkest hours of the Vilna ghetto.
“The Nazi assault on the distinctive communal life that long characterized Jewish Europe was strategic,” says Miller. “Mass murder dealt a mortal blow to these vibrant cultures. Today we can only glimpse what it was like through the melodies of Joseph Achron, with their folkloric elements of Russian Jewish life, and Egon Ledeć’s atmospheric salon pieces, final echoes of a soon-to-be-lost Central European gentility.”
MOR will be performing at Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Avenue North. As usual at the 90-minute Saturday afternoon performances, MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller (an international speaker on musicians’ spiritual resistance during the Holocaust) will introduce the musical works and their composers, and offer social and historical contexts for the pieces.
Baritone Erich Parce joins MOR to sing Laitman’s song cycle The Seed of Dream, based on the poetry of Vilna Ghetto survivor and resistance fighter Abraham Sutzkever. Hiding in a coffin to elude soldiers, seeing a cart filled with shoes and recognizing his mother’s, mourning his dead son—Sutzkever captured each experience in rhyme and meter that never falters. Reviewing the latest MOR CD, which includes The Seed of Dream, the American Record Guide praised Laitman’s work as “very fine song-writing,” and said Parce’s “reading of these songs is full of poignancy.” The performance also features some of the Northwest’s top chamber musicians: Leonid Keylin, Page Smith, Zart Dombourian-Eby, Susan Gulkis Assadi, and Valerie Muzzolini, as well as Miller on piano.
Sparks of Glory Musical Witness Series
Hosted by the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) & the Good Shepherd Center (GSC)
FREE TO THE PUBLIC*
A Vanished World
2:00 p.m., Saturday, January 31, 2009
Good Shepherd Center, Wallingford
4649 Sunnyside Ave. N.
Joseph Achron
Stempenyu Suite
Leonid Keylin, violin; Mina Miller, piano
Egon Ledeć
Serenade and Kyticka
Leonid Keylin, violin; Mina Miller, piano
Lori Laitman
The Seed of Dream (MOR Commission)
Erich Parce, baritone; Mina Miller, piano, Page Smith, cello
David Stock
A Vanished World (MOR Commission)
Zart Dombourian-Eby, flute; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Valerie Muzzolini, harp
* This series is made possible, in part, by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterspieces program. Music of Remembrance is the recipient of a Chamber Music America Residency Partnership Program Grant with funding provided by the CMA Residency Endowment Fund.
About Music of Remembrance
Music of Remembrance (MOR) fills a unique spiritual and cultural role in Seattle and throughout the United States by remembering Holocaust musicians and their art through musical performances, educational activities, musical recordings and commissions of new works. Since its 1998–99 inaugural year, MOR has presented two major concerts annually at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) each fall and Holocaust Remembrance Day each spring.
Media Contact:
Mina Miller, Artistic Director
Ph: (206) 365-7770
Email: info@musicofremembrance.org