SEATTLE, WA—April 24, 2009—Music of Remembrance (MOR) presents two world premieres of works it has commissioned—from composer Aharon Harlap and Tony Award-nominated choreographer Donald Byrd—at its 7:30 p.m., May 11, 2009, spring concert at Benaroya Hall.

 

The Seattle-based chamber music organization, dedicated to remembering Holocaust musicians and their art through performance and education, commissioned the Canadian-born Israeli composer Aharon Harlap to create a new arrangement of his Pictures from the Private Collection of God, scored for two voices, string quintet and oboe.

 

Those two voices will be opera baritone Erich Parce (heard locally most recently singing with the Auburn Symphony Orchestra and the Bellevue Philharmonic) and mezzo soprano Angela Niederloh (a Houston Grand Opera Studio alumna who made her MOR debut last spring with Paul Schoenfield’s Ghetto Songs). The Jerusalem Post describes Harlap’s work as “evocative, original and beautiful, synthesizing American Neo-Romanticism, Yiddish music and Israeli styles in an atmosphere all its own.”

 

ACT artistic director Kurt Beattie will introduce each song in this cycle with a dramatic reading of the English translation. The poems, sung in Hebrew, were written by the Hungarian Holocaust survivor Yaakov Barzilai. Harlap found inspiration in Barzilai’s work before, with Letters Weeping in Fire (a song cycle MOR performed in 2006). “So many people came up to me asking about Aharon’s music after that performance,” said MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller, “that right away I knew Seattle was eager to hear more from him.”

 

After decades of near-oblivion, Austrian composer Franz Schreker’s music will now be heard by both music and dance fans. MOR’s first-ever dance commission comes from Donald Byrd, who was nominated for a 2006 Tony Award for his choreography for The Color Purple musical. Artistic director of Seattle’s Spectrum Dance Theater, Byrd set his dance to Schreker’s The Wind, and MOR welcomes three dancers from Byrd’s troupe (Geneva Jenkins, Patrick Pulkrabek, Marissa Quimby) to perform the new work. Noted television journalist and documentary producer John Sharify (formerly with KOMO-TV) will interview Byrd in a pre-concert discussion at 6:45 p.m.

 

Schreker’s work is a potent example of the Holocaust’s cultural destruction. By 1920, Franz Schreker was, after Richard Strauss, the most performed living opera composer in the Weimar Republic.  Schreker’s decadent drama, The Wind, is one of six pieces he wrote during 1908–09 for interpretive dancers Grete and Elsa Wiesenthal, former ballerinas with the Vienna Court Opera. With the rise of Nazism, Schreker was targeted for his Jewish origins, his avant-garde style and his progressive politics. Performances of his works provoked scandals, and became increasingly rare. Schreker suffered a stroke in 1933, and died the following year at age 56. With no one to champion his work, his career was left a footnote in music history.

 

Audience favorites the Northwest Boychoir, led by Joseph Crnko, will return to sing two choral works by Israeli composer Betty Olivero which they first performed at MOR in November 2006. Shtiler, Shtiler is Olivero’s setting of a lullaby written by an eleven-year-old Vilna Ghetto prisoner. Olivero’s Mode’Ani’ is based on the Jewish prayer recited upon waking to thank the Creator for breathing the soul into the body once again. A Holocaust survivor (a part sung by Erich Parce) can recite only the first part of the prayer, horrified that after his years of trial he has forgotten the rest.

The concert opens with Osvaldo Golijov’s 2002 Tenebrae, which the composer says can be heard “as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript…built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.” Singing Golijov’s work will be soprano Emily Hindrichs, an alumna of the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program. The program also includes the music of Edwin Geist, who composed his Cosmic Spring (1942) in the Kovno Ghetto, where he was murdered by the Gestapo.

 

Tickets: $36

Phone Orders: 206-365-7770
Fax Orders: 206-985-6924
Online Orders: www.musicofremembrance.org

Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, Seattle

7:30 p.m., Monday, May 11, 2009

 

6:45 p.m. Meet the Choreographer: John Sharify interviews Donald Byrd

Tenebrae (2002)

Emily Hindrichs, soprano

Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Leonid Keylin, violin; Arie Schächter, viola; Mara Finkelstein, cello

 

Cosmic Spring (1942)

Leonid Keylin, violin; Mara Finkelstein, cello; Mina Miller, piano

 

The Wind (1909) World Premiere of Choreography (Music of Remembrance 2009 Commission)

Donald Byrd, choreographer

Spectrum dancers: Geneva Jenkins, Patrick Pulkrabek, Marissa Quimby

Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; John Cerminaro, French horn; Walter Gray, cello; Craig Sheppard, piano

 

(1995)

Erich Parce, baritone

Laura DeLuca, basset horn & clarinet; Valerie Muzzolini, harp

The Northwest Boychoir, Joseph Crnko, conductor

 

Pictures from the Private Collection of God (2009) World Premiere (Music of Remembrance Commission)

Erich Parce, baritone and Angela Niederloh, mezzo soprano, Kurt Beattie, actor

Mikhail Shmidt, violin, Elisa Barston, violin; Arie Schächter, viola; Walter Gray, cello; Jonathan Green, double bass; Ben Hausmann, oboe

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 Kristallnachtwww.musicofremembrance.org. (The Night of Broken Glass) each fall and Holocaust Remembrance Day each spring. More information available at