Free Public Concert Series Delves into an Unheard History of Resistance

SEATTLE, WA—August 14, 2009—Music of Remembrance (MOR) launches the fifth season of its free Sparks of Glory outreach series, with performances at the downtown Seattle Art Museum and the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. The season begins on Saturday, October 10, 2009 with the concert Camp Songs at 2:00 p.m. in the Seattle Art Museum’s Plestcheeff Auditorium. This, and April’s concert Rodas Recordada, are linked to the museum’s permanent gallery exhibit Burden of History, a provocative exploration of visual imagery that communicates the emotional impact of war and oppression.

 

“This may be our most ambitious season of Sparks of Glory yet,” said MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller, “and one that illustrates—with a set of terrific contemporary works—how the lessons of the Holocaust resonate with artists today.”

 

MOR describes Sparks of Glory as “concerts-with-commentary” because Miller (an international speaker on musicians’ spiritual resistance during the Holocaust) introduces the musical works and their composers, and offers social and historical contexts for the pieces at the 90-minute Saturday afternoon performances. The musical works are performed by some of Seattle’s leading musicians, many of whom also perform with the Seattle Symphony.

 

The October 10, 2009, program features Paul Schoenfield’s searing Camp Songs. Angela Niederloh and Erich Parce will sing a new English translation that vividly conveys the irony and brilliantly mordant humor of journalist Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a Polish journalist and political dissident. The work is based on songs and poems that Kulisiewicz composed while imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Audiences will also hear Swiss-born émigré Ernest Bloch’s meditative and deeply soulful Prayer for double bass, and the stirring Duo for violin and cello that Czech pianist Gideon Klein composed shortly before his deportation to the concentration camp Terezín.

On December 5, 2009, Sparks of Glory visits Wallingford’s Good Shepherd Center, and the program delves more deeply into how the Nazi propaganda machine attempted to portray Terezín as a model ghetto that would demonstrate the Third Reich’s “humane” treatment of the Jews. In reality, inmates passed through Terezín on their way to the death camps—or succumbed first to starvation or disease. Remarkably, the musicians and composers imprisoned there never ceased creating: Gideon Klein wrote his vibrant, melodic Trio just nine days before his transport to Auschwitz.

 

Other artists turned to the sly wit and satire of cabaret songs, often based on melodies from hit songs of the day in Berlin and elsewhere. These songs, performed by Jenny Knapp and Erich Parce, display a morale-raising form of spiritual resistance to the oppression that had enveloped camp inmates and their families. Finally, the program includes the audaciously original Erwin Schulhoff, who was sent not to Terezín but to a camp in Bavaria, where he perished in 1942. Schulhoff—banned as “degenerate” by the Nazi regime—united dance, jazz, and folk song melodies in string quartets that are only now gaining the recognition they merit.  

On March 13, 2010, MOR returns to Wallingford. Angela Niederloh sings acclaimed contemporary composer Lori Laitman’s song cycle Fathers, a work that explores the father-child relationship through the words of two poets whose fathers were murdered by the Nazis: Sri Lankan poet Anne Ranasinghe and Russian poet David Vogel. Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem is a deeply touching musical portrait of Chassidic life, while Erwin Schulhoff’s sparkling Duo bears the influence of Leos Janácek, to whom it is dedicated.

 

For the fourth and final program of the season, April 17, 2010, MOR returns to the Seattle Art Museum with Canadian composer Sid Robinovich’s Rodas Recordada. The work relates a story that the Spanish poet Guillermo Díaz-Plaja told about his encounters with the Sephardic community of Rhodes before and after its destruction by the Nazis. The moving ballad, performed by Megan Hart, Erich Parce, and Jenni Bank, has revealed an unexpected arc of history reaching from Greece to Seattle.

 

SAM audiences will also hear the young Israeli composer Lior Navok’s Found in a Train Station, sung by Vira Slywotzky, a work based on a note that a mother pinned to her child before she boarded a train to a concentration camp. Two other contemporary compositions fill out the program: the haunting sounds of Simon Sargon’s Before the Ark for violin and piano, and the ethereal, poignant beauty of Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae, with soprano Megan Hart.

MOR’s education and outreach series, created to bring chamber music to Seattle’s varied communities, is supported this season, in part, by a grant from Chamber Music America.

 

Camp Songs October 10, 2009 2:00 p.m. (SAM)

Ernest Bloch
Prayer

Jonathan Green, double bass; Mina Miller, piano

Gideon Klein
Duo

Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Walter Gray, cello                                    

Paul Schoenfield
Camp Songs (English version, commissioned by Music of Remembrance)

Angela Niederloh, mezzo soprano; Erich Parce, baritone
Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Walter Gray, cello; Jonathan Green, double bass; Craig Sheppard, piano

Unconquered! December 5, 2009 2:00 p.m. (GSC)

Gideon Klein
Trio

Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Mara Finkelstein, cello                         

Various
Terezin Cabaret Music

Jenny Knapp, mezzo soprano; Erich Parce, baritone
Mina Miller, piano

Erwin Schulhoff
String Quartet No. 2

Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Leonid Keylin, violin; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Mara Finkelstein, cello

Fathers March 13, 2010 2:00 p.m. (GSC)

Ernest Bloch
Baal Shem (Three Pictures of Chassidic Life)

Leonid Keylin, violin; Mina Miller, piano

Erwin Schulhoff
Duo

Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Walter Gray, cello

Lori Laitman
Fathers

Angela Niederloh, mezzo soprano
Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Walter Gray, cello; Mina Miller, piano

Rodas Recordada April 17, 2010 2:00 p.m. (SAM)

Simon Sargon
Before the Ark

Leonid Keylin, violin; Mina Miller, piano

Megan Hart, soprano; Jenni Bank, alto; Erich Parce, baritone
Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mara Finkelstein, cello; Steven Novacek, guitar                 

Vira Slywotzky, soprano
Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Steven Novacek, mandolin; Mara Finkelstein, cello; Mina Miller, piano

Megan Hart, soprano
Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Leonid Keylin, violin; Arie Schachter, viola; Mara Finkelstein, cello; Laura DeLuca, clarinet

 

*This series is made possible, in part, through a Chamber Music America Residency Partnership Program Grant with funding provided by the CMA Residency Endowment Fund.