2011-12 Season Preview
Music of Remembrance returns to Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle for our 2011-12 season, with chamber music concerts on November 7, 2011, and May 14, 2012. Tickets for the spring concert are on sale now. You can purchase them here.
Cultural life in America, and in other countries, was enriched by the many émigré artists who fled persecution in Nazi-controlled Europe. This season we focus on the experience and music of several fascinating émigré composers and their musical contributions in their new homelands. Our Kristallnacht Commemoration concert in November features What a Life!, a satiric cabaret-like revue by the Vienna-born composer Hans Gál. Gál created and staged the revue for the entertainment of his fellow prisoners in the English detention camp where wartime authorities interned “enemy aliens,” including many Jews who had recently fled to Britain from Germany and Austria. What a Life! contains ironic numbers like "The Barbed Wire Song," "The Ballad of the German Refugee," and "The Song of the Double Bed."
You'll also hear a lushly romantic piano trio by Marcel Tyberg, a Viennese composer, conductor and pianist. Tyberg was only one-sixteenth Jewish, but nonetheless he was sent to his death at Auschwitz. Before his deportation, he entrusted his handwritten scores to a family friend, and over the years they made their way from Milan and eventually to Buffalo, N.Y. MOR’s performance of the piano trio will be the West Coast premiere of this beautiful work.
At our Holocaust Remembrance Day concert next May, we unveil our second commission from opera composer Jake Heggie (Dead Man Walking, The End of the Affair, Moby-Dick). Heggie will be collaborating again with Gene Scheer, his librettist for MOR’s pathbreaking 2007 commission For a Look or a Touch. Their new work brings fresh life to the incredible true story of Krystyna Zywulska. Here’s how Jake Heggie describes this remarkable tale:
The full breadth of Krystyna Zywulska’s work as a memoirist, poet, and satirist is still being revealed and given new appreciation. To escape deportation—or the equally likely possibility of death by starvation—Zywulska walked out of the Warsaw ghetto with her mother, in broad daylight, in 1942. Using aliases, she worked with the Polish resistance, counterfeiting identity cards and documents. Captured by the Gestapo, she ended up at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and there took up writing satiric poetry.
The concert continues our efforts to showcase the work of composers whose music expressed national and cultural roots in dire peril. We’re joined again by the marvelous Northwest Boychoir in Viktor Ullmann’s settings of Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs. Ullmann was raised a Catholic, and converted to Protestantism before returning to Catholisicm. Still, because his parents had been born Jewish, Ullmann was deported to Terezín, where he created this haunting choral music between 1943 and '44; less than a year later he perished in Auschwitz. It is a heartbreaking irony that Ullmann rediscovered his Jewish heritage in a Nazi concentration camp.
The Jewish Czech composer Pavel Haas composed his Suite for Oboe and Piano in 1939, and its musical allusions to the St. Wenceslas Chorale have been seen as statements of solidarity with the Czech people following that year’s German occupation of their country. You'll also hear Polish folk elements in the third string quartet by Syzmon Laks. Laks—a Polish composer, conductor and violinist—survived Auschwitz and Dachau, and settled in Paris after the war. This quartet was composed immediately after his liberation from Auschwitz.
It will be another memorable season, and we hope that you’ll be part of it.
