Yiddish culture takes the spotlight in “Ray of Sunshine,” Music of Remembrance’s May 12 concert at Benaroya Hall. The title comes from a line in Paul Schoenfield’s Ghetto Songs, which will receive its world premiere at the concert, with the composer at the piano.
The concert also features the Northwest Boychoir in performances of Yiddish songs by Viktor Ullmann, a Chava Alberstein song arranged by David Stock, and works by Egon LedeÄ and Erwin Schulhoff.
Music of Remembrance is the Seattle-based organization dedicated to music from and about the Holocaust.
Paul Schoenfield’s music has been well represented in Seattle. His popular “Café Music” is on the program of the May 7 concert at Benaroya Hall celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary, and has been played by the Bridge Ensemble and the Seattle Chamber Players. The Seattle Symphony has performed several of his works in recent years, including Klezmer Rondos, Sinfonietta, and the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, the latter with principal violist (and longtime MOR performer) Susan Gulkis Assadi as soloist.
Reached by phone at his home in Cleveland, Schoenfield conveys the impression of a man who leads both a deep spiritual life and a life of the mind. He is an acclaimed composer whose works have been performed by major orchestras and chamber groups. He teaches mathematics at a Jewish day school. He is an observant Jew who lived in Israel for several years, and spends much of his spare time studying the Talmud. His conversation is seasoned with terms from all of these aspects of his life.
Schoenfield says he composes “exactly like a cabinet maker or a carpenter” rather than a Romantic artist. “I work from the outside in — form first, length, shape, what it’s going to express — before I write a single note.”
His job, he says, is to make his music as beautiful, functional and aesthetically pleasing as possible. He is not interested in what he calls “idol worship” in music, be it worship of a composer or of a particular style.
Schoenfield, born in 1947, was trained in the atonal techniques that dominated music in the 1950s and ‘60s. After composing in that vein for a while, the young Schoenfield wrote a simple, fun piece for a contemporary music festival.
“Everybody had a great time playing it, and everybody loved listening to it,” he says. “That impacted me.”
Perhaps as a result, Schoenfield developed an accessible style that combines classical and modern compositional techniques, often strongly flavored with Jewish elements or jazz.
The composer’s previous MOR commission, Camp Songs, is a dark work filled with sarcasm and black humor. This time, Schoenfield wanted to do something different. Bret Werb of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. provided a new direction. Werb showed the composer poetry by Mordecai Gebirtig, a Polish-Jewish folk musician and carpenter known as the “Yiddish Troubadour.”
The poems speak of life in Krakow during the Nazi occupation. A selection of six poems and a few of Gebirtig’s surviving melodic fragments became the basic source material for the new work. The texts run a gamut of emotions, from wistfulness through to despair, ending on a note of hope tinged with irony.
“These are not esoteric poems,” says MOR artistic director Mina Miller. “They are so personal, so direct, so evocative of human feelings.”
She notes that the first poem, “Shifrele’s Portrait,” with its theme of a family separated by war, will resonate with Americans today. Of the music, Miller says: “In someone else’s hands, these would have been simple folk songs. Paul keeps it folksy, but also dramatic.”
The voices are equal partners, and there are duets throughout. Schoenfield “really knows our musicians,” says Miller, and uses them beautifully.
Baritone Morgan Smith and Portland-based mezzo-soprano Angela Niederloh will perform Ghetto Songs. Smith is well-known to Seattle audiences for performances in Don Giovanni and Jake Heggie’s For a Look or a Touch, an MOR commission which was just released on the Naxos label. Niederloh is making her MOR debut. She recently sang the title role in Rossini’s La Cenerentola (Cinderella) at Portland Opera.
Ghetto Songs will be sung in Yiddish, with English narration by A Contemporary Theatre’s artistic director Kurt Beattie. Seattle Symphony principal cellist Joshua Roman will join composer-pianist Schoenfield, clarinetist Laura DeLuca and several of MOR’s regular string players in the instrumental ensemble.
Mezzo-soprano Julie Mirel will perform “Mayn Shvester Chaya,” by Israel’s “first lady of song,” Chava Alberstein. It’s a setting of the late Israeli poet Binem Heller’s tribute to his older sister, still a child herself, who raised him while their mother worked. Chaya did not survive the Holocaust.
“It’s for her,” Heller penned, “that I write my poems in Yiddish.”
Composer David Stock has arranged the song for voice, clarinet and string quartet.
Viktor Ullman was a composer, conductor, and musical leader in the Nazi “model camp” TerezÃn before his deportation to Auschwitz. He studied with composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alois Haba, but did not adopt a strictly atonal style like his teachers. In TerezÃn, he wrote the opera The Emperor of Atlantis, chamber music, and also arranged Yiddish folk songs for chorus.
“These are great,” says Miller, noting that choral singing was a very important part of the cultural life in TerezÃn. The Northwest Boychoir will perform some of Ullman’s Yiddish settings, conducted by Joseph Crnko.
Another TerezÃn composer, Egon LedeÄ, will be represented by three salon-style chamber pieces. LedeÄ made what might be the quintessential statement on the importance of art, even in the face of genocide: “By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon … our endeavor with respect to Arts was commensurate with our will to live.”
Many of MOR’s concerts have included music by the eclectic and engaging Erwin Schulhoff, and this one is no exception. Schulhoff will be represented by his 1925 Concertino for flute, viola and double bass.
Each year MOR holds auditions for the David Tonkonogui award, created to honor the memory of the beloved Seattle Symphony and MOR cellist. The award is presented to a gifted young musician with demonstrated interest in the Holocaust. This year’s winner is 13-year-old violinist Marié Rossano of Bellevue. She is a Seattle Chamber Music Society Emerging Artist, and has performed with the Seattle Symphony and several local orchestras. Rossano will perform Ernest Bloch’s Nigun.
Mina Miller hopes that the concert will help revitalize “this lost, vanished world” of Yiddish-speaking European Jewish culture, adding that it poses the question: “How do we cope with social injustice and intolerance today?”
A “Ray of Sunshine”
