SEATTLE, WA—September 22, 2009—On Saturday, October 10, Music of Remembrance (MOR) launches the fifth season of its free Sparks of Glory outreach series, with a performance at the Seattle Art Museum downtown. Camp Songs begins at 2:00 p.m. in the Seattle Art Museum’s Plestcheeff Auditorium, and takes its name from the program’s work by American composer Paul Schoenfield.

 

Paul Schoenfield’s Camp Songs—sung by Angela Niederloh and Erich Parce in a new English translation by Katarzyna Jerzak—gets its scathingly sarcastic bite from the words of Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a Polish journalist and political dissident imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II. In his songs and poems, Kulisiewicz wrote of the camp crematorium operator’s enthusiasm for his work, and he mocked Hitler with a derisive sendoff. Even Churchill smokes a cigar while people burn. Schoenfield’s score brilliantly captures these portraits’ searing irony.

 

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. For Camp Songs, Miller will discuss the museum’s permanent gallery exhibit “Burden of History,” a provocative exploration of visual imagery that communicates the emotional impact of war and oppression.

 

Audiences will also hear Swiss-born émigré Ernest Bloch’s meditative and deeply soulful Prayer for double bass, taken from his 1924 From Jewish Life suite. (Bloch emigrated to the U.S. in 1916, and spent the last twenty years of his life in Agate Beach, Oregon.)

 

The Czech pianist Gideon Klen composed his stirring Duo for violin and cello shortly before his deportation to the Terezín concentration camp. Klein was one of the artists who played an important part in the remarkable creative life at Terezín. The Nazi propaganda machine attempted to portray Terezín as a model camp that would demonstrate the regime’s human treatment of Jews. In reality, however, the camp was a way-station from which nearly all inmates, including Klein, were sent to their deaths in extermination camps to the East. 

 

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. The musical works are performed by some of Seattle’s leading musicians, many of whom also perform with the Seattle Symphony.

 

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

Ernest Bloch

 

Jonathan Green, double bass; Mina Miller, piano

Gideon Klein

 

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
Gideon Klein

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

 

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

 

*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.