Tag Archives: holocaust

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

May 15, 2013 Philippa Kiraly

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, Theatre

“Emperor of Atlantis” Opera is a Work to Hear More than Once

November 18, 2012 Philippa Kiraly

Music of Remembrance continues with its adventuresome programming in this, its 15th season, with a short opera written in the Terezin concentration camp but banned before it was performed there, its composer and librettist sent to their deaths in Auschwitz soon thereafter.

Viktor Ullmann’s and Peter Kien’s The Emperor of Atlantis finally had its premiere in Amsterdam in 1975 and has been widely performed since. The surrealistic, sarcastic opera with its searing, barely-veiled indictment of Hitler and his aims is about 50 minutes long, with seven singers and 13 musicians playing the assortment of instruments to be found then in the camp.

Briefly, it tells the tale of a reclusive, powerful and increasingly mad Emperor who decides the only way to create paradise out of his land is to have everyone killed. However Death takes umbrage at this presumption of his job and goes on strike, causing havoc and misery. Eventually Death offers to return with the Emperor’s agreement to be the first to die.

Erich Parce directs MOR’s production with skill and imagination. With a minimal set and brilliant costume choices—notably the all-in-one white satin corset and suspender-hung clocked stockings worn under her plain wraparound dress by the Drummer, voice and girlfriend of the Emperor (aka Hitler’s girlfriend Eva Braun); and the uniform worn by Death under his long black cloak which outdoes in splendor the Emperor’s—and a fine cast of voices, Parce has made a considerable achievement.

Add to this the group of mostly Seattle Symphony musicians led with insight by Ludovic Morlot, the opera seems set for success.

However, in Friday night’s performance at Nordstrom Recital Hall, the opera was sabotaged by not having a detailed synopsis or supertitles, as words were rarely clear, even though singers obviously were doing their best. The result was bewildering, expecially the first half. This will be remedied for Sunday evening’s performance (tickets) with a synopsis included with programs.

Musically, it’s a work to hear more than once. Ullman’s score includes hints of other composers and a couple of intentionally outright borrowings, though in unusual guise. When the Drummer proclaims the Emperor’s killing plans, she does so to the tune of “Deutschland uber alles,” albeit in a minor key, and at the end, the actors converge on the Emperor to the melody of “Ein feste berg” but with different harmonies. To take care of the space on stage in musical interludes, Parce had the good idea of including a couple of angels, one of light, one of darkness, but their choreography by Penny Hutchinson did not fit the tone of the opera.

Parce himself did excellent work as the Loudspeaker, as did Ross Hauck as Harlequin, Jonathan Silvia as Death, Victor Benedetti as Emperor Overall, Megan Chenovick as the Girl with Bobbed Hair and Marcus Shelton as a Soldier.

The program opened with Ernest Bloch’s Prayer, performed by the winner of the 2012 David Tonkonogui Memorial Award, the young teen-aged cellist Benjamin Shmidt, accompanied by a string quartet of Seattle Symphony musicians led by his father Mikhail Shmidt. This talented youngster has a fine technique and beautiful tone, but his performance was more careful than prayerful. It needed more soul, which no doubt he will acquire as he grows to maturity.

Violinist Leonid Keylin and Mina Miller performed Marc Lavry’s Three Jewish Dances, two for weddings and one Hora. Presumably these are dances for happy occasions, but Keylin’s performance was altogether too straighforward, lacking the flair and zest needed.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

At Spectrum, Donald Byrd Gives “Needless Talents” Human Faces

October 26, 2012 Michael van Baker

Cara-May Marcus and Ty Alexander Cheng in Spectrum's Theater of Needless Talents (Photo: Nate Watters)

Jade Solomon Curtis and Stacie L. Williams in Spectrum's Theater of Needless Talents (Photo: Nate Watters)

The Spectrum Dance troupe in Spectrum's Theater of Needless Talents (Photo: Nate Watters)

Alex Crozier-Jackson and Stacie L. Williams in Spectrum's Theater of Needless Talents (Photo: Nate Watters)

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More frequently in Seattle these days, you might catch yourself in an act of arts-going self-envy.

Where typically you might be reading about a blockbuster week in New York, or Edinburgh, or Avignon, and wishing yourself there, this week you could attend back-to-back performances of Kidd Pivot‘s The Tempest Replica (our review) at On the Boards and Spectrum Dance‘s Theater of Needless Talents (at the SDT Studio through October 28; tickets). These are both major works, and that’s following last weekend’s City Arts Festival, which itself set a new benchmark for arts installation and performance curation in Seattle.

This matters because however the arts move you–maybe they elevate, maybe they take you downtown–they can only move you so far, singly. But together, they can shift your center of gravity, fragment your perspective, create new harmonies. Urban density makes a city take place–arts density makes minds take place, just as if you were walking along a Jane Jacobs sidewalk, encountering artworks as you go. (She called it the “ballet of the good city sidewalk,” in fact.)

It’s an engine of serendipity, letting you tussle with Shakespeare one night, and a response to the Holocaust the next, and in so doing, witness the construction of a city of cities.

To bring this back down to earth, consider choreographer Donald Byrd’s statement that, with The Theater of Needless Talents, he wanted to get into how particular humans keep finding ways to commit atrocities against humanity. Rather than totalizing Nazi power, buying into the Reich’s myth, his work, iconoclastic as ever, breaks it into pieces: At the outset, members of the troupe recite the statistics of who killed, who was killed, where they lived–you see a spate of killings, setting off more killings. Contingency re-enters the history.

The stark set (designed and originally lit by Jack Mehler, with lighting here by Rico Chiarelli) is a bare floor, with a square box taped out, divided into tic-tac-toe format; above the dancers are blocks you surmise are inspired by the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. The plain curtain is sketched out in the style of Terezín artworks. That, in conjunction with the period-ish (for dancers’ purposes) costumes by Jessica Markiewicz is all that’s needed to create the dread and (fatalistic) joy of the era.

Byrd is fascinated in this piece, slightly revised for these performances, by what’s known as “negative capability,” defined variously, but most famously by Keats as an ability to meet manifold reality without filtering it through your identity first. For Byrd, the cabaret-style performances in the concentration camp Terezín are emblematic of this state of mind. Was it a courageous way to reclaim their humanity? A form of denial? Submission to Nazi whim? A morale boost? Was it all of these things?

In composer Erwin Schulhoff, who died in a concentration camp in Wülzburg, Bavaria, Byrd has found a fellow iconoclast and outsider, with a similar taste for experimentation in forms and genres. The work uses Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello (1925), Hot Music, 10 Studies in Syncopation; 5 Etudes in Jazz; Suites Dansant en Jazz; and the second movement from his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1914). Performers are pianist Judith Cohen, remarkably adept at bridging classical and jazz; and violinist James Garlick and cellist Rajan Krishnaswami, the last of Simple Measures, who drew bravos during their bows.

At times, Byrd has used dance to find the extremes in music; here, the music is in extremis, and his choreography, often tender. Where it startles–a dancer drops to the floor as if shot in the head, early on, though the dance continues–it is not dramatic so much as an intrusion of that reality. I think a book could be written about the difference (it is anti-dramatic to lose people randomly, when the murder is no mystery), so I have to leave it at that: the impact of subtraction.

Derek Crescenti acts as a mouthpiece for former camp members, and his forceful, direct delivery does not need any “for a dancer” qualifications. The remembrances of prisoners (when a guard told a child her mother was probably that smoke over there, coming out of that smokestack; when Mengele sewed the twins together; when an inmate realized he felt giddy at not having to worry about being put in a concentration camp anymore, since he was in one) set up the scenes that follow, though Byrd is very attentive to the music, so there is juxtaposition as much as dramatization.

Shadou Mintrone gets comedic dances, with Chaplinesque pratfalls, big grins, jazz hands–all tinged with the hysteria of someone driving themselves not to crack, to lift the spirits of others. Jade Solomon Curtis does crack–her index finger practices becoming a gun to her temple, again and again. Donald Jones, Jr., and Kate Monthy dance a torrid, bittersweet duet with an invisible third member, the prospect of separation. Bodies knot up, bend into impossible shapes, lock themselves to each other. Bodies shake, go limp with illness, exhaustion, and yet there’s always someone so hungry for human touch that they can’t let go, who lifts the body like luggage they’ll carry with them.

People were not always made into different or better people by circumstances: Ty Alexander Cheng is caught between two women, Mintrone and Cara-May Marcus, and if one falls, another is there to pull him in. Marcus has the expressive face of a silent movie star, and she is not always in control, but you can’t look away. Just as Schulhoff interpolated jazz, Byrd brings in popular dance, a few steps, a tango-like series. Hands slap the flat of the inner thigh like percussion, and punishment. Marcus curls into a ball in Cheng’s arms, but woman also support men, lift them up. In a short, heart-breaking sequence, Vincent Michael Lopez and Derek Crescenti portray a gay couple whose embraces are both a desperate solace and furtive.

At the close, Byrd revisits the earlier recitation of statistics, his troupe updating them into a roar of what sounds like ceaseless slaughter since World War II. In the program notes, he quotes President Obama: “Awareness without action changes nothing.”

Then consider the coincidence that, for Keats, the master of negative capability was Shakespeare, author of The Tempest. In Pite’s telling–which opens with Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) triggering Ariel (the incredible Sandra Marín Garcia) with the phrase “shipwreck,” and an astonishing cinematic spectacle of projected rain, billowing gauze curtains, and dancers rolling on a “pitching” deck–negative capability is humanity. Up until Prospero lets himself take in what is present before him, his frozen vengefulness (its origins told in an enrapturing shadow-puppet show) is in turn recapitulated in his puppetry of actual people.

Because this is an interpretation, I think there’s a case, as well, for considering the players to be wrapped in folio parchment, so that Prospero’s regained humanity emerging is doubled by Pite’s choreography emerging from the text, its story. There are other, structural reasons this is intriguing–the second half is all human blossoming, both in pain and regret and anger, and in joy and expression and freedom, in counterpoint to that shipwreck spectacle, and yes, I think it’s interesting which you prefer–but side-by-side with Needless Talents, there’s that framework again of cruelty, imprisonment, and humanity hard-pressed but unconquerable.

To see both of these works is to be impressed, literally, by them. They leave a mark, they layer maps onto you, leaving everything strange and yet more real than before. You are their conversation.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Jake Heggie Tackles the Burden of Memory in Another Sunrise

May 12, 2012 Philippa Kiraly

MOR_caitlin — Soprano Caitlin Lynch, right, rehearses Another Sunrise with the MOR Ensemble.

“I love coming back to Seattle and Music of Remembrance,” declares composer Jake
Heggie, his words endorsed by librettist Gene Scheer. These two men, up to their eyebrows in prestigious commissions (an opera each, one for Dallas, one for San Francisco, a symphony and chamber music for Heggie, plus more), can’t say enough in praise of Music of Remembrance, its founding director Mina Miller, and its musicians.

They are here for the premiere at MOR of their latest work, Another Sunrise, on Monday May 14 at Benaroya Hall.

“It’s so important for us that the work that we do is meaningful. Every program with Mina and MOR teaches me something informative, educational, and enriching before I even put pen to paper. Every time I come to Music of Remembrance, I come away a better person,” he says.

The mission of Music of Remembrance, now in its 14th season, is to remember Holocaust musicians, poets, and artists through musical performances, educational programs, musical recordings, and commissions of new works, in two concerts a year held at times meaningful to Holocaust survivors, plus a series of smaller, free performances, and a lot of educational outreach.

“It starts with Mina,” says Scheer. (The two men, who have worked closely together on a number of works, the most recent for MOR being the 2007 music drama For a Look or a Touch, speak in tune with one another, their thoughts in parallel.) “She has a visionary, passionate intelligence which yields incredible results. She’s one of the most articulate people I know. She has enthusiasm, generosity, and a conviction that these stories must be told.

“She looks for an unusual angle with which to approach the material,” says Heggie. “She wants a fresh perspective, how the past lives in present memory.”

“It begins with what happened and how does one remember,” says Scheer. ”How do we tell this narrative and makes sense of those lives?”

The process for Another Sunrise began when Miller asked the two men what they would like to write about for MOR. As they hashed out ideas, what came to the fore was the question of what survivors feel, the burden of their memories.

“Who knows what we are capable of when there is a gun to our heads?” queries Scheer, “so, we came up with the nature of survival.”

At this point Miller found, and gave them to read, two books written by one of those Holocaust survivors, Krystyna Zywulska. As they learned more about this woman, her story seemed to fill the bill. “She had to do things to survive which haunted her the rest of her life,” says Heggie. (Miller was able to find Zywulska’s son, Tadeusz Andrzejewski, and he has come from Paris for the premiere Monday and will speak about his mother.)

And then, Scheer found an interview Zywulska gave in Poland to a political science professor for a book on survival memories.

“I sensed that her responses could be the fulcrum for this piece,” says Scheer. “Her frustration with what she could not put into words, that she couldn’t describe,” an ironic situation, as Zywulska had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau through writing satirical lyrics set to popular tunes, and later made a careeer writing lyrics for pop songs.

She had no answers that she found truly satisfactory to how she survived in Auschwitz. Heggie and Scheer came up with an approach to Zywulska’s story which is fictional in format but true to the story Zywulska tells in her autobiographies.

“We thought, What if the professor had given her a tape recorder, to tell that what she could when the words came to her, and that became the dramatic device we created,” says Scheer. “She wakes in the middle of the night and can’t sleep. This is years later, and she’s haunted by things she couldn’t say, a melody she hums and can’t find the words to. She turns on the machine—and turns it off. What does she want to leave for posterity? As she talks she defines herself, only she can’t find the words.”

“So what can’t be described in words, can be described in music,” says Heggie. “My job is to empathize deeply with the character, only she’s not just a character, she’s a real person. I needed to get into her heart, to the very purest part, and just feel and respond, as a musical soul. She’s on an emotional rollercoaster. It’s a dark night of the soul. She’s trying to make sure others don’t go through what she went through.”

Says Gene, “We are both after the same thing, the storytelling. If I’m doing my job right, I’m building the scaffolding for the musical landscape being depicted on stage. It’s not that the words would fade away, we want people to take away the emotional experience.” One singer, a chamber ensemble, and minimal staging make up the dramatic scene for Another Sunrise.

For the solo role, Heggie and Scheer chose soprano Caitlin Lynch, a graduate of Seattle Opera Young Artist program who sang Micaela in Seattle Opera’s most recent Carmen, an intelligent, sensitive artist with the technique and voice to match. “She even looks like Krystyna,” comments Heggie.

Lastly, he says, “This is a work of art, it’s not a documentary. What we are after is her emotional life, something that resonates as true.”

“Everything described here is true,” says Scheer, “but in language I created, though there are two or three quotes I took from her interview.”

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Music of Remembrance’s “Astounding” What a Life!, a British Detention Camp Revue

November 8, 2011 Philippa Kiraly

We are now starting the fourteenth season since Music of Remembrance began its odyssey, of telling the tale of the Holocaust from the aspect of the creative art nurtured within its horrors.

Its indefatigable founder and artistic director, Mina Miller, has every year unearthed more highlights, sidelights, spotlights, and gems of music and poetry pertaining to life in the concentration camps, ones that most of us would never have known about were it not for her work.

Each year Music of Remembrance offers two concerts at Benaroya Hall’s Nordstrom Recital Hall, one around the time of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which took place November 9, 1938, when Nazi thugs roamed Germany destroying anything and everything Jewish they could find. The other concert takes place in May and next year commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day with a new opera by Jake Heggie.

Monday’s concert, like so many others in this series, brought a largely unknown aspect of the Holocaust to our attention, with a satiric revue, What a Life! by composer Hans Gál, composed and performed when he was in an internment camp on the Isle of Man off the coast of Wales in the United Kingdom.

Like many others, I never knew until recently that the British interned anyone they thought might be supporting German aspirations, and since they couldn’t tell who was bona fide and who was an infiltrator among the thousands of Jewish refugees pouring into the country, they interned them all until they had checked them out. Families were broken up, communication was poor. Families already refugees were subjected to even more stress.

Like the Japanese internment camps in this country and opened for the same reason, they are a blot on the country’s history. (I am English. Yes, England was on her knees in 1940, and many of my family died along with so many others, but it still seems shameful to me that we should have interned any Jews.)

Hans Gál, however, bore the British no lasting ill will, and unlike so many of his countrymen, lived a long and fruitful life in that country until his death in 1987.

His cabaret revue comprises a series of songs of camp life sung here by baritone Erich Parce and tenor Ross Hauck to words by Schubert scholar and fellow-internee Otto Erich Deutsch, with a small orchestra of piano, four strings, and two winds. Originally there was a theatrical script between numbers written by another internee, film director Georg Hoellering. This has been lost, and a new narrative taken from Gál’s diary which he kept meticulously.

What’s astounding is Gál’s and Deutsch’s upbeat attitude. The songs are irreverent, ironic, rueful, and funny as they skewer camp life. As well as singing, Parce gave it a light staging, so that a six-foot stretch of wire with barbs appears for the “Barbed Wire Song” (“Why are human beings behind wire?”), and a folding single bed arrives for the two singers in “Song of the Double Bed” with humorous consequences on stage (though they probably weren’t at the time). From the diary excerpts, read by actor Kurt Beattie, we find that the row of beachside hotels commandeered for the camp housed 72 inmates per house.

Gál was only in the camp about 19 weeks, but this clever, amusing, and truthful revue with its charming music hits home. In addition to the two singers, Jesse Parce acts as a battlebloused camp guard, with an unnerving toothbrush moustache.

Earlier in the program flutist Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby, and violinists Elisa Barston and Mikhail Shmidt performed Gál’s four-movement Huyton Suite, written while he was in transit camp near Liverpool in 1940. His own words say it best: “Here I am, writing…ridiculous, fantastic music…while the world…is coming to an end.”

True. The Suite, written for the only instruments available to him, is perky, and amusing, optimistic, lively, with the flute mimicking the camp bugle, a well-written piece we might easily hear on Seattle Chamber Music Society’s programming.

The program began with Vilem Tausky’s beautiful 13-minute Coventry: Meditation for String Quartet from 1941. Better known as a conductor, Tausky wrote this quartet while a member of the Czech Army in Exile and helping to search for survivors after the big Nazi air raid on Coventry. The first impression is that it conjures up the same mood as Barber’s Adagio for Strings. There is a sadness which pervades it, and part which seems a protest. The viola, played by Susan Gulkis Assadi, leads the melody, and the whole ends with a chord resolving into the major, perhaps an acceptance.

The fourth work on the program, Marcel Tyberg’s Piano Trio in F major, is a comedown musically from the quality of the other works. It’s a palm-court, salon-style piece, lush, a bit pretentious, schmaltzy, well-constructed but old-fashioned for its date, 1936.

Other musicians for the program included violinist Leonid Keylin, cellists Mara Finkelstein and Walter Gray, and pianists Craig Sheppard and Mina Miller.

The SunBreak