Monday, April 23, 2001
Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya, 7:30 PM
Seattle, WA
| Dance for String Trio (Terezín,1943) | Hans Krasa (1899-1944, Auschwitz) |
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| Mikhail Shmidt, violin Susan Gulkis, viola David Tonkonogui, cello |
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| Suite Modale (1956) | Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) |
| Jody Schwarz, flute Mina Miller, piano |
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| Songs of Political Satire | Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and Friedrich Hollaender (1896-1976) |
| Julie Mirel, mezzo soprano Mina Miller, piano |
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| Carmen Fantasie (1946) Based on themes from the opera of Gerges Bizet |
Franz Waxman (1906-1967) |
| Leonid Keylin, violin Mina Miller, piano |
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Intermission |
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| Introduction by Guest Composer, Steve Reich | |
| Different Trains (1988) for string quartet and pre-recorded performance tape |
Steve Reich (b. 1936) |
| Mikhail Shmidt, violin Jeannie Wells Yablonsky, violin Susan Gulkis, viola David Tonkonogui, cello |
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Dance for String Trio, ( Terezín, 1943) - Hans Krasa (1899-1944)
In 1941, the Nazis converted Terezín, a former fortress outside of Prague, into a concentration camp. Unique among the Third Reich's horrors, Theresienstadt (as the Germans called it) bred a grotesque combination of death and culture. Among the approximately 141,000 Jews and others who passed through were many artists and musicians. Cabarets, concert halls and stylish streets were set up to suggest to the outside world a model "city for the Jews," masking the camp's reality of starvation, disease, and regular deportations to Auschwitz. Meanwhile, in the face of fear and deprivation, both public and surreptitious creativity flourished in Terezín. A sham "self-government" actually supported a program of musical composition and performance.
Hans Krasa, born in Prague in 1899, was sent to Terezín on August 10, 1942. Active in the musical theatre life of his hometown, Krasa followed his teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky, to Berlin in 1927. Deeply attached to Prague, Krasa returned there after less than a year in Berlin, despite offers of conducting positions in Berlin, Paris and Chicago. His reputation as a composer of opera, symphony and chamber music led to performances and broadcasts of his works in Zurich, Boston and New York.
In Terezín, Krasa led the music section of the Freizeitgestaltung (Administration of Leisure Activities). He was deported to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944, and was murdered in the gas chambers the next day.
Krasa's works composed in Terezín include Dance as well as Passacaglia and Fugue, Three Songs, and Overture for Small Orchestra. A children's opera, Brundibar, which he had written before his internment, received over fifty performances by the camp's children, and is said to have contributed greatly to lifting the spirits of his fellow inmates.
Suite Modale (1956) - Ernest Bloch (1880-1959)
For much of the 20th century, Bloch was the preeminent voice of a "Jewish" sound in concert music. Born in Geneva, into a home where the chants of Talmud study sank deeply into his musical memory, Bloch's teachers included Jacques-Dalcroze and Ysaye. In Paris, he absorbed Impressionism; back in Geneva, he was a bookkeeper in his father's business, while composing, conducting, and lecturing at the Geneva conservatory.
In 1916, Bloch traveled to the United States as conductor with a dance company. When their tour fell through, he accepted a teaching position at the Mannes College of Music in New York City. It was in 1916 that Bloch composed Schelomo, his celebrated work for cello and orchestra inspired by King Solomon. Other works in this period of his so-called "Jewish cycle" included three psalm settings, Three Jewish Poems, and the Israel Symphony. In 1918, Bloch conducted an entire program of his Jewish music with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Bloch was often asked for the source of his "Jewish" sound. He once answered, "I have hearkened to an inner voice, deep, secret, insistent, burning…a voice which seemed to come from far beyond, beyond myself and my parents, a voice which surged up in me on reading certain passages in the Bible."
As founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music (1920-25), Bloch's radical ideas of musical education (including the notion that exams and textbooks were less important than studying the great masters' scores) clashed with the school's trustees. He moved on to San Francisco, where he directed the Conservatory of Music until 1930. Back in Switzerland, Bloch composed and conducted, returning to the United States briefly in 1934 to conduct the premiere of Avodath Hakodesh ("Sacred Service"), a setting of the Reform movement's Sabbath prayers.
Bloch finally left Europe and returned to America for good in 1938, settling into a cliffside house at Agate Beach on the Oregon coast, just north of Newport. He would occasionally drive to Berkeley, as professor of music at the University of California. The war caused Bloch great despair, as his artistic vision was a dream of humanity united.
An accomplished nature photographer, Bloch developed a friendship with Ansel Adams, and is remembered as having conscientiously taught his grandchildren to guard the environment. Today, an annual Ernest Bloch Music Festival takes place in July in Newport, Oregon, keeping alive his passion for education through performances, symposia and master classes.
The Suite Modale was composed during Bloch's quiet late period in Oregon, just two years before his death. He also arranged the piece for flute and string orchestra (1959). In contrast to the robust orchestration characteristic of much of Bloch's more famous work, this music is a humbler meditation. The music floats in an Oriental mode, through four movements which flow seamlessly from one to another. While Bloch's specifically "Jewish" music often reflects passionate struggle, this gentle suite is the voice of a composer at peace with a universal spirit.
Songs of Political Satire
Schickelgruber (1942) - Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
Schickelgruber was the maiden name of Hitler's grandmother, who bore the future dictator's father, Alois, out of wedlock. For 40 years, Alois was known by this last name. Adolf never used it, but his political opponents revived it for him.
Kurt Weill was certainly one of those opponents. Weill's celebrated work with Bertolt Brecht in Berlin made high art in the cabarets of the Weimar Republic. Less well known, perhaps, is Weill's work in the United States, where he came to live in 1933 after barely escaping a Nazi plan to arrest him. For the rest of his short life, Weill was one of America's busiest film and theatre people. When the U.S. entered the war against Hitler, Weill (who identified strongly with his Jewish heritage) and many other American artists used their talents to help boost morale. One project, The Lunch Hour Follies, brought Weill and his colleagues out to shipyards in Brooklyn and Long Island, where factory workers watched the satirical shows as they ate. "They had a wonderful time," Weill wrote about one such performance, "and when it all was over we heard them saying: 'We'll do twice as much work this afternoon.' We all felt that here is the most natural field of activity for all those writers, musicians and artists who are desperately looking for their place in the nation's War effort." Each show included some songs and sketches satirizing the Nazis. Schickelgruber is one of these.
Among the many talents with whom Weill collaborated for these shows was Howard Dietz, a prolific writer and history-making PR talent. Creator of the "roaring lion" trademark for Goldwyn Pictures (later MGM), Dietz joined Goldwyn in 1919; he directed advertising and publicity for the studio until he retired from MGM in 1957. In his spare time, Dietz penned more than 500 songs.
An allem sind die Juden schuld (1931) - Friedrich Hollaender (1896-1976)
(It’s always the fault of the Jews)
Hollaender's father, Victor, a composer, has been called the grandfather of the Berlin operetta at the turn of the century. Friedrich's career, after early study at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik and the Stern Conservatory, began with writing music for productions by Max Reinhardt at his Berlin cabaret. In 1931, Hollaender opened his own cabaret, the Tingeltangel; people flocked to this popular club, where satirizing fascism was the order of the day. A pianist and prolific composer, poet, actor, and director, Hollaender is acknowledged as the creator of the distinctive melancholy in the satire of the Weimar Republic.
Hollaender was the composer behind Marlene Dietrich's now-classic 1930 film, The Blue Angel. After his emigration in 1933, he wound up in Hollywood, where he wrote music for some 120 films. Hollaender returned to live in Germany in 1955.
Many intellectuals of the time viewed Hitler and his movement as a bizarre, temporary phenomenon best confronted as a joke. “It’s always the fault of the Jews” comes from a satirical musical called Spuk in der Villa Stern (Ghost in the Villa Stern), which confronts the bourgeois world of the proletariat and the nouveau riche. The song laughs at the anti-Semitic scapegoating common in that world by carrying it to absurd extremes.
Carmen Fantasie (1946) - Franz Waxman (1906-1967)
Based on themes from Bizet’s opera
Waxman was Hollaender's orchestrator for The Blue Angel. In addition to composing for films, young Waxman played piano and did arrangements for a popular 1920s Berlin jazz band. In 1934, when a beating by Nazi thugs convinced him it was time to leave, he came to America. Settled in Hollywood, he would eventually compose music for 144 movies, earning twelve Oscar nominations and two consecutive Academy Awards.
For the film Humoresque (1947), Waxman created two "Fantasies": this one, on Bizet's popular opera, and another on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. John Garfield "played" them on screen; Isaac Stern recorded them on the soundtrack. The story of the budding career of a young violinist (Garfield) and his patron (Joan Crawford) caught the attention of Jascha Heifetz, who asked Waxman to expand the Carmen Fantasie for him. Heifetz premiered the work on September 9, 1946, on radio's Bell Telephone Hour. The 1946 Heifetz recording of the work is still in print.
Different Trains (1988) - Steve Reich (b. 1936)
Pre-recorded material from Steve Reich's Different Trains performed by the Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch Records 79176-2). The piece was commissioned by Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet.
Born in New York, Reich as a young child traveled regularly by train between New York and Los Angeles, accompanied by his governess, following the divorce of his parents. The years were 1939 to 1942. He recalls, "While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains. With this in mind I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation."
Like his early childhood, Reich's career as a composer has been unorthodox and exciting. The man who was named Composer of the Year 2001 by Musical America, and honored with Columbia University's prestigious William Schuman Award, started drumming in his early teens. As a philosophy major at Cornell, Reich's perspective grew from a music history class where, he recalls, "we began with really early music….and then moved on to world music and experiments. Only then did [we] go back and deal with the familiar masters. Compared to what we had begun with, all that 50-great-masterpiece stuff was like an afterthought." From the traditional canon, he cites Perotin, J.S. Bach, and Stravinsky as influences.
He studied at Juillard with Bergsma and Persichetti, and at Mills with Berio, and then he discovered, on the streets of San Francisco, the music for his first composition, It's Gonna Rain (1965). The taped voice of a street preacher, he found, could turn into a new kind of music through the use of "phasing": bringing two tape machines with identical, edited bits of that voice, slowly into and out of synch with each other. He expanded this technique into compositions for instruments, where identical patterns would chase each other until they blended into something quite new. Short phrases, hypnotic repetitions, and minimal, gradual harmonic changes gave rise to the term "minimalism," applied to the art of Reich and others in late 1960s New York.
In Ghana, he studied drumming in 1970, then returned to spend the next year composing Drumming, a piece for nine percussionists that lasted over an hour. In Seattle and Berkeley in 1973, Reich studied with Balinese teachers, as he composed Music for Mallet Instruments. By 1976, Reich was thinking about what tradition he himself belonged to. He plunged into the study of Hebrew, and of the Torah and its cantillations. He traveled to Israel to hear the chants of non-European Jews. The first musical result was his 1981 composition, Tehillim, a setting of verses from Psalms, at once revolutionary and respectful. More recently, Reich and his video artist wife, Beryl Korot, collaborated on The Cave, about the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, where tradition says the patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah are buried. The work involves taped voices of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, echoing among instruments.
In Different Trains, Reich takes the music of everyday speech, notates it, and gives it instrumental life. He prepared the piece, first, by interviewing two people who remembered very well the trains he knew: his governess, Virginia, and a retired Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, who used to work the lines between New York and Los Angeles. He obtained the recorded testimonies of three Holocaust survivors, all about his age; and he collected American and European train sounds of that time.
Reich clipped out samples of the speech tapes in which the pitches of the speaker's voice can actually be notated musically. Once he had written the phrase as music, he could have the instruments play those same notes. In the piece, the strings sometimes imitate the vocal melody before the speaker says it, as in the opening phrase, "from Chicago to New York." The voices become instruments among other instruments, some of which are live, and others on tape, engineered from a control board in the audience. Three separate string quartets are on the pre-recorded tape. The MOR concert performance was engineered by the composer.