MOR’s Sparks of Glory also commemorates the musical legacy of the Holocaust with works by Schulhoff and Bloch

SEATTLE, WA—January 6, 2010— The fifth season of the free chamber music outreach series Sparks of Glory, presented by Seattle’s Music of Remembrance (MOR), continues at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 13, 2010, with a performance at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. This premiere of a new version of Fathers, the song cycle by American composer Lori Laitman, will bring Portland Opera mezzo soprano Angela Niederloh back to Seattle.
 

At these 90-minute “concerts-with-commentary,” MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller introduces the musical works and their composers, and delves into social and historical contexts for the music. Programs typically combine Holocaust-era chamber music with contemporary pieces that reflect on the Holocaust’s lasting effects, and are performed by some of Seattle’s leading musicians, many of whom also perform with the Seattle Symphony.
 

Benaroya Hall audiences previously heard Niederloh’s “dramatic and powerful mezzo” (The Gathering Note) at MOR’s spring 2009 mainstage concert—now the Wallingford community will hear the former National Finalist in the Metropolitan Opera’s council auditions sing this new version of Laitman’s work. Gramophone has called Laitman a “major talent” and said, “Lori Laitman’s beautiful, sensitively crafted songs deserve to be performed widely.”
 

Fathers, which originally had its world premiere at MOR in 2003, centers on the relationship of fathers with their children. Composer Laitman chose works by two poets: Sri Lankan poet Anne Ranasinghe (“You, Father”, “Don’t Cry”, “Last Night I Dreamt”), whose father was murdered by the Nazis, and Russian poet David Vogel (“I Saw My Father Drowning”), who was arrested by the Nazis and then disappeared from the pages of history. Laitman broke “Don’t Cry,” up into fragments that she used as a “healing balm,” preceding and tempering the nightmarish visions of the other poems, before closing with “Don’t Cry” in full.
 

Probably the most famous composer of the Holocaust era to be rediscovered is Erwin Schulhoff. Banned as “degenerate,” his music vanished from symphony halls and languished in obscurity for decades. His sparkling Duo (1925) bears the influence of Leos Janácek, to whom it is dedicated—it finds its roots in Czech folk tunes. The young Schulhoff boasted at spending “night after night” dancing, and his Duo invigorates with its own lively dance rhythms.
 

Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem is a deeply touching musical portrait of Chassidic life, named for Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Chassidism. Bloch, an émigré, wrote it in 1923, the year he became an American citizen, and the work celebrates the “enigmatic, ardent, turbulent” Jewish soul that fascinated him as a composer.
 

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.

 

 

 

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

Leonid Keylin, violin; Mina Miller, piano

 

Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Walter Gray, cello

 

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

 

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

 

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.