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Arts & Entertainment, Music

“Stunning” Premieres from Jake Heggie & Gene Scheer at Music of Remembrance

Morgan Smith, baritone

Completing its 15th season Tuesday night at Nordstrom Recital Hall, Music of Remembrance once again gave its audience music and memories that propel discussion and stay with you long after the performance is over.

Composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, both continuously in demand by major opera companies, important musical organizations and musicians, took time, again, from their busy work schedules to create another work for Music of Remembrance.

In fact, two works.

Their group of songs, Farewell, Auschwitz, explores the enduring legacy of Polish Jew Krystyna Zywulska through the poetry she wrote as a political prisoner in Auschwitz, her Jewish identity unrealized by the Nazis. It’s a continuation of the music drama they premiered with MOR last season, Another Sunrise, on the appalling dilemmas Zywulska faced in her painful struggle to stay alive and make a difference.

But as well as this important premiere, Heggie and Scheer also created a distillation of their first work for MOR in 2007: a song cycle from their music drama For a Look or a Touch, which brought to prominence Nazi persecution of gays though the diary of a young gay man, Manfred Lewin, who was murdered at Auschwitz but whose partner survived.

It was the performance of this distillation which left the strongest impression of Tuesday night’s concert. Baritone Morgan Smith, who created the role of the diarist as ghost in 2007, sang the cycle of five songs. A 2000 graduate of Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, he has honed his strong baritone and considerable acting skills to a fine international operatic career, but, like Heggie and Scheer, he has come back to MOR more than once.

With a quintet of flute (Zart Dombourian-Eby), clarinet (Laura DeLuca), violin (Mikhail Shmidt), cello (Walter Gray), and piano (Craig Sheppard), Smith embodied the despair of the Auschwitz present, the memory of freedom, fun and love in prewar Berlin, the yearning and grieving of the now, the witnessing of horror with the incongruity of Nazi musical overlay, and speechless sorrow.

The poignancy of his acting, this tall man with long arms at a music stand, the agony in his big voice, had the audience riveted as he brought to life Scheer’s beautiful lyrics drawn from Lewin’s diary with Heggie’s music. This mirrored the times, including the Weill-like sassiness of 1930s Berlin with a memorable jazzy clarinet solo from DeLuca in “Golden Years,” the celestial, melancholic imagery in “A Hundred Thousand Stars,” and the nightmarish contrasts between savagery and sweet waltz in “The Story of Joe.”

Hearing this performance would alone have made the concert memorable, but the premiere of Farewell, Auschwitz after intermission added more.

Music of Remembrance rehearsal of “Farewell, Auschwitz” (Photo: MOR)

Zywulska, who never previously had written lyrics, wrote them to keep herself going in Auschwitz and set them to popular music of the day. They took fire in the camp, and because of them she was given a job in the Effektenkammer, the warehouse where were collected the belongings stripped from new female prisoners before they were gassed. This effectively kept Zywulska alive.

In Farewell, Auschwitz, Scheer took Zywulska’s satiric poems or fragments thereof and made free poetic adaptations, while Heggie, facing the impossiblity of finding the original tunes, created music which might have been of that era, either movie or Weill-like or folk melodies, even adding a bit of Chopin and Liszt. All of it, however, had an indefinable touch of today in harmonies or musical progressions.

Smith was again one of the singers, along with soprano Caitlin Lynch and mezzo soprano Sarah Larsen, also past graduates of Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, while the instrumental quintet included DeLuca, Shmidt, Gray, Sheppard, and Jonathan Green, double bass.

The lyrics are intense, moving portrayals of life in the camp and at the same time songs of resistance, brilliant writing by Scheer from Zywulska’s original words. Heggie’s music is equally brilliant, evocative of the era, descriptive of the words — and at times shocking in its impact, particularly in the final song, also titled “Farewell Auschwitz.” At the end, the three singers gripped hands and stood defiant:

Take off your striped clothes;
Kick off your clogs.
Stand with me.
Hold your shaved head high.
The song of freedom upon our lips
Will never, never die.

I was not the only one in the audience with tears in my eyes.

I would have preferred Lynch and Larsen to pitch their voices a little more softly at times, given that Nordstrom holds only 540 seats rather than 3,000, but that was my only quibble.

Two instrumental works completed the program. Laszlo Weiner’s String Trio—Serenade of 1938 introduced us to a fine work from a composer whose life was cut short in 1944 in Lukov labor camp. It was well played by Shmidt, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, and cellist Mara Finkelstein, and worth hearing again.

The concert opened with a 1930 violin-and-piano adaptation of a suite from Weill’s The Three Penny Opera, done by a close friend of Weill’s, Stefan Frankel, who eventually became concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. It’s a showy and difficult violin part—shades of Paganini—but the performance sounded as though it was a first rehearsal by pianist (and founder and moving spirit of MOR) Mina Miller and violinist Leonid Keylin. Keylin, an excellent violinist, brought no soul to this. The work didn’t seem to speak to him, so it also didn’t speak to us.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Till Fellner Turns in a Cool, Crisp Performance at Meany’s President’s Piano Series

Till Fellner (Photo: Ben Ealovega)

The UW President’s Piano Series opened Tuesday at Meany Theater with Austrian musician Till Fellner playing Haydn, Schumann, Liszt, and a new work by Kit Armstrong.

The last-mentioned is a 19-year-old prodigy who began formal composition and piano studies at five and college at seven, appeared as piano soloist with orchestra aged eight, had many compositions to his credit by ten, and is now studying with pianist Alfred Brendel in London, while also pursuing science studies in the field of pure mathematics at the Pierre and Marie Curie Institute.

I wish some of the above information about him had been in the program. Armstrong’s notes were intellectual and mathematical, as though music was a specific problem to be worked out, and the nearest to a feeling being one mention of “floating.”

Fellner, who has also studied with Brendel, has that great pianist’s thoughtful and less-is-more approach to understanding a composer, but his performance Tuesday could have used more warmth.

That said, his performance of Haydn’s Sonata in C major, Hob XVI:50, composed quite late in the composer’s life, was a marvel of elegance, clarity and exquisite touch. Fellner could have been playing a fortepiano, with his articulation and airy lightness creating notes which almost bounced out of the keys like impish drops of sound in the opening measures.

He could also play with an equally beautiful legato, his hands seemingly just stroking the sound out.

The choice of this sonata to go before the Armstrong might have been intentional, as Armstrong’s piece, Half of One, Six Dozen of the Other, also had these light, bouncing notes spaced like drops at both beginning and end. It’s a 15-minute work, composed for Fellner, and is classical in its style and restraint, though entirely modern in its harmonies which however are not dissonant. There is no romantic outpouring here, though as the work grows and arcs, the spare beginning becomes more fast and furious.

It suited Fellner, whose playing seems characterized by impeccable, yet restrained, performance.

This was all very well here, but Schumann’s  Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) and Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage: Deuxième Année: Italie (Years of Pilgrimage, Second Year, Italy) both required more emotion. [You can also hear Craig Sheppard take on Années de Pèlerinage this Friday at Meany-Ed.]

Each of these works comprises many sections (13 in the Schumann, nine in the Liszt), each with titles which indicate something about the content. While these were all listed in the program, they were useless during the performance, when one might have wished to see just what the composer was describing, such as in the ninth Schumann scene, “Knight of the hobbyhorse.” Meany Theater has always turned the lights down so that it is impossible to refer to the program during the performance. I do wish this could be changed. It often detracts from the enjoyment when one is left puzzling about what the composer was after.

Fellner’s playing of both works was always beautiful, but the overall feel he conveyed was one of introspection. The only time when it seemed to really come alive being with the gleam of humor which shone through in the third Liszt section, the “Canzonetta of Salvator Rosa” where a leisurely, jaunty, crisp rhythm pervailed.

A little more passion throughout wouldn’t have come amiss. Next up in the series is Nikolai Lugansky, on November 15.