Music of Remembrance’s thirteenth season highlights Jewish folklore and its influence on composers of yesterday and today. You’ll hear the original music for S. Ansky’s seminal Yiddish play The Dybbuk, accompanied by the world premiere of a new dance score we’ve commissioned. There’s also Israeli composer Betty Olivero’s thrilling suite of dance music from her score to the classic silent film The Golem, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s intimately evocative From Jewish Folk Poetry.

Composer Joel Engel wrote his Dybbuk Suite as incidental music for the 1914 Ansky play that was to become a cornerstone of Yiddish theater in Europe and America. An ethnographer and playwright who led expeditions in search of Jewish folklore in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, Ansky grew fascinated by the legend of the dybbuk—an often-malign spirit of a deceased person that inhabits and takes control of somebody still living. In his play, a young woman, on the day of her wedding, is possessed by the soul of the brilliant Talmudic scholar who died of unrequited love for her. MOR has invited choreographer Donald Byrd to bring a new dimension to Engel’s engaging score, and you can experience its world premiere, with principal dance artists from Spectrum Dance Theater, at our November concert.
 

Our season’s second MOR commission, Israeli composer Betty Olivero’s Kolo’t (“Voices”), receives its world premiere in May 2011. Sung in Ladino, Kolo’t describes the fate of the Sephardic Jewish community in Thessalonika. It is a very personal work, reflecting Olivero’s family origins in Thessalonika, and it expresses the fierce pride of the Sephardic culture that thrived there before the Holocaust. We return to the season’s theme of Jewish folklore with Olivero’s thrilling suite of dance music extracted from her film score to Wegener’s film The Golem. Its mystical setting, combined with klezmer-influenced sounds, blur the lines of memory and fantasy, history and myth. 

As always, we honor the legacy of composers who perished at Nazi hands. Our May program includes Czech composer Pavel Haas’ String Quartet No. 2, an evocation of the composer’s fond memories of summer vacations in the “Monkey Mountains” outside Brno. Haas was deported to Terezín in 1941, and murdered three years later in Auschwitz.

We also remember Terezín with Lori Laitman’s song cycle based on her extraordinary oratorio Vedem. If you were with us for last May’s concert, you’ll surely recall that oratorio, based on the words and lives of a group of teenage boys who published a clandestine journal every week for two years. In the song cycle, you’ll hear a more intimate setting for six of the boys’ poems, with their courageous accounts of love, fear, and hope. 

Why does folklore matter? How do works like The Dybbuk and The Golem contribute to the Holocaust’s musical legacy that MOR commemorates? Wegener’s Golem film, and Ansky’s  Dybbuk play, were both creations of the early 1920s, and they tell us a great deal about forces that would soon transform the world in ways that nobody then could imagine. The Golem’s provocative imagery of Jews and Jewishness had deep repercussions in a turbulent post-WWI Germany, with its conflicting currents of Jewish assimilation and separation, and an increasingly virulent anti-Semitism. The Dybbuk helped launch a famous Yiddish theatre company in the young Soviet Union, where an emerging movement of Jewish self-expression would be buffeted by the shifting winds of Soviet ideology and politics.

The Dybbuk and The Golem are poignant reminders of a culture and its idioms that the Nazi regime sought to destroy. But these legends are far more than objects of ethnic nostalgia. They are richly layered morality tales with universal resonance: the struggle between the mystical and the material; the ambiguous boundaries between the traditional and the modern; the dilemmas of invoking divine intervention for worldly ends. The song and dance of this season’s music will take you to a world made vivid by complex dreams and struggles with deep meaning for today.