By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
When Music of Remembrance commissioned Betty Olivero to write a piece for this year’s spring concert, they didn’t expect one of Israel’s most respected composers to draw from her own personal history. It’s one that Seattle’s large Sephardic community can relate to.
“She’s chosen to weave the story around Ladino ballads and love poems alongside a very poignant letter from an Auschwitz survivor from Thessalonika,” said Mina Miller, music director of Music of Remembrance. MOR commissions and performs music based upon the experiences and legacies of the survivors and victims of the Holocaust.
This spring, MOR approaches the experience of Sephardic Jews for the first time with the story of the Jewish community of the Greek isle of Thessalonika, which saw 98 percent of its population perish.
Mezzo-soprano Angela Niederloh will perform, with an ensemble of violin, viola, cello, clarinet, harp, and percussion, Olivero’s work “Kolo’t” (“Voices”) at Music of Remembrance’s Holocaust Remembrance Day concert at Benaroya Hall on May 9.
Joining Olivero’s work is a smaller version of last year’s headline piece. For last year’s spring concert, MOR commissioned Lori Laitman to compose a piece based on an underground magazine called Vedem, stories and poetry by a group of teenage boys imprisoned at the Terezin concentration camp. This year, the poems have been pulled from the larger work into their own song cycle.
“They made their secret world as a way of escaping from the tragedy and fear that was engulfing them,” Miller said.
Not all of these boys survived the Holocaust, but one of them, Sidney Taussig, who was 14 at the time, risked his own life to take 800 pages and bury them so he could retrieve them once the war ended. It took many years before Taussig and another of the boys, George Brady, could get the writings published. But a book released in 1995 called We are Children Just the Same included parts of those manuscripts.
“When I read the book in 1995,” Miller said, noting that it was before she had even founded Music of Remembrance, “I knew that someday I would commission a work to one day tell this wonderful story through music.”
In this more intimate retelling, Niederloh will be joined by tenor Ross Hauck and accompanied by clarinet and piano to perform what Laitman called “a portable version” of the piece.
Miller said she hopes to take this smaller work out of the concert hall and into schools and for other educational opportunities.
“The music is accessible and really taps into richly emotional human experience,” she said.
When originally composing the works, Laitman used her two well-tested criteria to choose the poems she ultimately set to music: “I look for a good story and I look for things that I think will translate will into song,” she said. “These six poems seemed to me that they would provide a great dramatic story.”
As a composer, Laitman has a standard method that she used for this song cycle. This time, however, came one exception: A poem called “Love in the Floodgates,” which was, believe it or not, comic relief.
“I took it because…instead of the suffering of the boys, it showed their longing for having a relationship that was kind of thwarted by the situation,” Laitman said. “It was a good contrast to the other poems.”
What made it special, though, was the day after Laitman completed a draft, she received a call from Miller. She was with one of the survivors, Amiel Koppel, who had just come to the U.S. from Australia.
Koppel told Laitman that as he was on the death march, “the only thing that kept him going was replaying the Dvorak “˜Humoresque’ over and over so he could keep walking,” she said.
He asked Laitman to add the “Humoresque” to the oratorio.
“This was very surprising — the tune to the “˜Humoresque’ fit over my draft almost exactly,” Laitman said. “That was kind of freaky and kind of neat.”
Dvorak fans should keep their ears at attention.
Rounding out the concert will be another Olivero piece, “Zeks Yiddishe Lider un Tantz” from the MOR commission The Golem, and String Quartet No. 2, Op. 7 by Pavel Haas, a gifted Czech composer who died at Auschwitz.
Music of Remembrance has a premiere of another kind in early May as well. A documentary called The Boys of Terezin will screen at an MOR fundraiser on May 7 will salute Vedem contributors Taussig and George Brady, who will attend. Former KOMO-TV reporter John Sharify, who has long been affiliated with MOR, produced the film. Some seats are still available.