Season Includes Screening of Classic Silent Film "The Golem" with Live Performance of Score, Premiere from Spectrum Dance Theatre, New Betty Olivero Commission

Media Contact:

Mina Miller, Artistic Director

Ph: (206) 365-7770

Email: info@musicofremembrance.org

SEATTLE, WA—September 3, 2008— For its eleventh season, Seattle-based Music of Remembrance (MOR), a chamber music organization dedicated to remembering Holocaust musicians and their art through performance and education, has filled two mainstage concerts with exciting programs and imaginative artistic collaborations.

The lineup of Music of Remembrance's special guests includes German conductor Guenter Buchwald, a specialist in scores for silent films; Spectrum Dance Theater's Donald Byrd, nominated for a Tony Award for his choreography for the Broadway musical The Color Purple; and Israeli composer Betty Olivero, whom conductor Zubin Mehta has called "a major talent," and "one of the best composers around today." MOR also continues its fruitful associations with the Northwest Boychoir and the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program.

Performing at Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Seattle's Benaroya Hall, MOR will present two performances of its fall concert on November 2 and 3, 2008, and a one-night-only spring concert on May 11, 2009. Season ticket packages are $72, and are available from MOR at (206) 365-7770 or online at https://www.musicofremembrance.org/store/2008-09-season-subscription.

"Throughout our first decade, we emphasized the diversity of the Holocaust's victims: women, children, political dissidents, gypsies, and homosexuals," said MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller. "This season we focus on the complex question of Jewish identity, but with a truly diverse set of artistic contributors."

The diversity extends to new artistic mediums-film and dance-represented at MOR's chamber music concerts. At the fall concert, MOR presents a screening of Paul Wegener's classic expressionist film The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), with guest conductor Guenter Buchwald leading Betty Olivero's klezmer-influenced musical score. (A pioneer in silent film music's renaissance, Buchwald is particularly renowned for his work with The Golem, and will speak about The Golem and German silent film at SIFF Cinema at Seattle's McCaw Hall on October 30. That talk will be followed by a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with Buchwald on piano and violin. The event is co-hosted by MOR and SIFF Cinema.)

"The Golem was made at a pivotal time in European Jewish life, and contains provocative imagery of Jews and Jewishness," explained Miller, who will introduce the film at MOR's concert. "In this turbulent landscape, conflicting currents of Jewish assimilation and separation coincided with a rising tide of increasingly virulent anti-Semitism."

In addition to The Golem, the fall program includes two compelling contemporary works: India-born American composer Simon Sargon's haunting Before the Ark, for violin and piano, contemplates the presence of the sacred. Young Israeli composer Lior Navok's Found in a Train Station-for soprano, mandolin, clarinet, violin, cello and piano-was inspired by the note written by a Polish woman as she was forced to board a Nazi deportation train, pleading for a righteous person to protect the young child she made the agonizing decision to leave behind. Soprano Vira Slywotzky, a new Seattle Opera Young Artist, sings.

At the May 11, 2009 spring concert, MOR continues to explore the beautiful and far-ranging music of contemporary Israeli composer Betty Olivero. We present the world premiere of Olivero's new MOR-commissioned work Kolo't (Voices), incorporating poems and texts by Primo Levi and Paul Celan, with star vocalists baritone Morgan Smith and mezzo soprano Angela Niederloh. MOR is also joined by the astonishing Northwest Boychoir, led by Joseph Crnko, in a reprise of two magnificent choral works by Olivero. Shtiler, Shtiler is Olivero's setting of a lullaby written by an eleven-year-old Vilna Ghetto prisoner. Baritone Morgan Smith joins the Boychoir in Olivero's Mode' Ani', based on the Jewish prayer recited upon waking to thank the Creator for breathing the soul into the body once again. In Olivero's composition, we meet a Holocaust survivor who can recite only the first part of the prayer, horrified that, after his years of trial, he has forgotten the rest. Bob Goldfarb will interview Olivero before the concert, at 6:45 p.m.

The concert's other MOR commission and world premiere is, amazingly, a dance. Spectrum Dance Theater joins MOR's performers in Franz Schreker The Wind, with original choreography by Spectrum's brilliant Donald Byrd. Schreker composed this decadent drama as one of six pieces he wrote in 1908-09 for interpretive dancers Grete and Elsa Wiesenthal, former ballerinas with the Vienna Court Opera. Schreker was later banned by the Nazi campaign against "degenerate" music. 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." The soprano is Emily Hindrichs, an alumna of the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program. The program also includes the music of Edwin Geist, who composed Cosmic Spring (1942) in the Kovno Ghetto, where he was murdered by the Gestapo.

Mainstage Concert Ticket Information:

Season Tickets: $72

Phone Orders: 206-365-7770

Fax Orders: 206-985-6924

Online Orders: https://www.musicofremembrance.org/store/2008-09-season-subscription

Fall Concert: The Golem

A concert to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht

Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, Seattle

4:00 p.m., Sunday, November 2 / 7:00 p.m., Monday, November 3, 2008

Simon Sargon

Before the Ark (1987)

Leonid Keylin, violin; Mina Miller, piano

Lior Navok

Found in a Train Station (2007) United States Premiere

Vira Slywotzky, soprano

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

Betty Olivero

The Golem (1997)

Guenter Buchwald, guest conductor

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

Spring Concert: Mirror of Memory

A concert to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day

Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, Seattle

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

6:45 p.m. Meet the Composer: Bob Goldfarb interviews Betty Olivero

Osvaldo Golijov

Tenebrae (2002)

Emily Hindrichs, soprano

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

Edwin Geist

Cosmic Spring (1942)

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

Franz Schreker

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

Donald Byrd, choreography*

Spectrum Dance Theater

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

Betty Olivero

Shtiler, Shtiler

Mode' Ani'

(1995)

Morgan Smith, baritone

The Northwest Boychoir, Joseph Crnko, conductor

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

Kolo't (Voices)

(2008) World Premiere (Music of Remembrance Commission)

Morgan Smith, baritone; Angela Niederloh, mezzo soprano

Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Elisa Barston, violin; Arie Schächter, viola; Walter Gray, cello

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 Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) each fall and Holocaust Remembrance Day each spring. Tickets available at https://www.musicofremembrance.org/store/2008-09-season-subscription.