Classical music blog The Gathering Note, in a post titled "Remembering a year of classical music in the Northwest," tapped MOR's spring concert as one of the top five of the year. The recognition was due to the premiere of Paul Schoenfield's Ghetto Songs, a song cycle based on the poetry of Krakow "troubadour" Mordecai Gebirtig. Ghetto Songs is the second of Schoenfield's commissions for MOR; his first, Camp Songs, was a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

In his review after the work's premiere, on May 12, 2008, The Gathering Note's Zach Carstensen said: "The music is deeply affecting, spanning emotions from despair to yearning. Schoenfield may approach composing like a craftsman, but Ghetto Songs demonstrated the power of poetry, music, even hope when circumstances appear bleak."

Seattle baritone Morgan Smith and Portland mezzo soprano Angela Niederloh sang the work, which is a setting of six Gebirtig poems found in the notebook the poet kept with him in the Krakow ghetto. Deported there in April 1942, two months later Gebirtig was shot and killed by German soldiers for refusing to be deported to the Belzec death camp. He was 65 years old.