Mirror of Memory: Music of Remembrance bears witness

Music of Remembrance’s concerts are always thought provoking, but Monday night’s stellar performance seered heart and mind.

From the first work, which felt as though it should be the final one on the program, to the the last which could not have gone anywhere else, this was a painful program of bearing witness. It was almost too much, but there were a couple of works which brought peacefulness or a change of attention.

True to its mission, to make sure we never forget what happpened in the Holocaust through the music and poetry written around it then and since, MoR chose settings of poems written by Shmerke Kaczerginski from the Vilna Ghetto in 1943, and others by Israeli poet Yaakov Barzilai who was in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a child. The Northwest Boychoir and the young men of Vocalpoint! sang the former: grieving poems, the first accompanied by the mournful sound of the basset horn (like a very low clarinet) played by Laura DeLuca with her customary expressive artistry; and with added harp (Valerie Muzzolini) and baritone Erich Parce for the second. The boys caught the feel of the poems and conveyed it with the beautiful singing for which they are known, conducted by their director, Joseph Crnko.

Barzilai’s stark and chilling Holocaust poems, “Pictures from the Private Collection of God,” have been incorporated into a song cycle by Canadian composer Aharon Harlap. For this concert, Harlap arranged them for string quartet plus double bass and oboe, a narrator and two singers, here mezzo-soprano Angela Niederloh and Parce. He dedicated it to MoR’s artistic director Mina Miller whose idea this arrangement was.

The hair-raising result came with the excellent performance, including Niederloh’s dramatic and powerful mezzo, though I wished she had used more nuance and a larger dynamic range. Parce is always a pleasure to hear.

Dancers lightened the atmosphere, in Franz Schreker’s “The Wind,” in which he took a poem by ballerina Grete Wiesenthal in 1910 and composed a musical depiction of it using violin, cello, french horn, clarinet and piano, for Grete and her sister to dance to. An eminent composer and director of the Berlin Hochschule fuer Musik, Schreker was hounded out of his job by the Nazis, and died in 1934.

Miller commissioned choreographer Donald Byrd to add the missing dance element, and he came through with a piece for three dancers showing a very active wind, strong at times with gusts and little dustdevils. Geneva Jenkins, Patrick Pulkrabek and Marissa Quimby of Spectrum Dance Theater brought it to life.

Schreker is one composer we should hear more of. Like Erwin Schulhoff, whose chamber music we are gradually getting to know and appreciate (often though MoR), Schreker was one of those composers whose lives were cut off and whose music was buried—until now. Another is Edwin Geist, whose “Cosmic Spring” was also played. The music betrays the painful time he was going through while he wrote this, trying to get his wife released from the Kovno Ghetto. It turns from slow and dignified to fierce and violent, frightening with clashing harmonies, and back to dignity again.

Last to mention, though first on the program and perhaps best of all the very good works played this night and well worth hearing, came Osvaldo Golijov’s “Tenebrae.”

For string quartet with clarinet, and a pure vocalise of the Hebrew alphabet undertaken by soprano Emily Hindrichs, this is a gorgeous work. It contrasts, Golijov says, the view of earth from a planetarium, the beautiful blue orb, and the current waves of violence in Israel which began in 2000. Mostly, it’s serene with the voice floating above the instruments, but with harsh, menacing interludes, then back to tenderness again. There was complete silence for a long pause at the end before applause broke out, a pause which was repeated after several of the other profoundly moving works on the program.

Most of the works were tonal, musically accessible often using a middle Eastern scale. The thread of peace alternating with violence came in more than once, sometimes an uneasy peace, more a hiatus, as in “Cosmic Spring.” Mourning was another thread which wove through each work, sometimes colored by horror, as in the Harlap songs. It was hard to take it all in, and let’s hope Miller programs most of these a second time.

It was an extraordinary concert, drawing rapt attention from the audience.

Miller, who gives eloquent notes from the stage beforehand—a help when the lights are turned down so much you can’t read the program—also dedicated this concert to the memory of Julian Patrick, opera singer, teacher, and friend to MoR, who died last week.

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