By Gigi Yellen-Kohn, JTNews Correspondent
An actor. A set. Props. Not your usual chamber music concert.
Music of Remembrance breaks out of the traditional mold to begin its sixth season with an acclaimed music-drama — “Through Roses” by Marc Neikrug — featuring actor John Rubinstein, best known to TV audiences from “Family” and “Crazy Like a Fox,” and to concert music fans as the great pianist Artur’s son.
The Nov. 2 concert at Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya marks the West Coast premiere of “Roses,” after some 400 performances worldwide, translations into 11 languages, and a recording on the Deutsche Grammophon label with violinist Pinchas Zukerman.
Joining Rubinstein in Seattle, Neikrug will conduct the ensemble of eight soloists, as well as deliver the pre-concert lecture at 6:45.
The solo character in “Through Roses” is a violinist who survived Auschwitz because of his musical skill. His very survival haunts him: powerful memories, the grotesque juxtaposition of beauty and mass murder will not set him free.
Viewers of Fania Fenelon’s Playing for Time, the TV film that starred Vanessa Redgrave as an Auschwitz musician, have learned about the orchestras in that death camp. Jewish musicians, in the service of the SS, played when transports arrived, to mask the situation. They played for prisoners being marched to the gas chambers; they entertained the SS guards.
Unlike Terezin, the concentration camp the Germans presented as a “model ghetto,” where the many Jewish artists, in fact, left a legacy of fine compositions and performances, Auschwitz offered no such cultural socializing to its inmates. The best a musician could hope for was to survive because some Nazi wanted music. The central character in “Through Roses” is based on Neikrug’s research and interviews with survivors of the Auschwitz orchestras.
One such survivor was the composer of the first piece on the November 2 concert. Szymon Laks wrote his “Passacaille” in 1946, right after liberation. The author of the autobiographical Music of Another World, Laks was a real-life example of one who owed his life to his music, and survived to struggle with both his memories and with publishers who argued against what they saw as his humanizing of SS guards.
“Laks wrote that when the guards heard the music, they became more human,” explains Mina Miller, Artistic Director of Music of Remembrance. In a sad irony, she adds, “He had to go back and insert some of the grotesque things he had left out of the book because the publishers thought he was too sympthetic to the SS.”
Also on the program: a piece by Italian Jewish composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, whose music was banned by the Third Reich in 1938. Jascha Heifetz, the great violinist and already an émigré, helped the composer sign a contract with MGM and join him in Hollywood.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco became the composition teacher of such film music legends as Henry Mancini, Andre Previn, and John Williams.
With the presentation of “Through Roses,” Miller says that Music of Remembrance takes another big step toward its goal of reaching beyond Seattle. Neikrug first heard of MOR through a 2002 Hadassah magazine article, which prompted him to call Miller and offer her this West Coast premiere.
“What is really thrilling is the type of international talent that we’re attracting, wanting to perform with us,” Miller says. “Last year it was Gerard Schwarz, who is anxious to work further with us, and next spring we have Jane Eaglen.
“There is an audience out there beyond Seattle,” she continues. “We have agreed on expanding our mission nationally. With the recognition that our first recording (Art from Ashes, Vol. 1) has received, with the Pulitzer finalist recognition to Paul Schoenfield for his work on that recording, “Camp Songs,” which we commissioned, our goal is to become a professionally managed organization. The challenge is how we expand from our grass roots support to building a structure to accommodate the opportunities now open to us.”
Music of Remembrance presents two concerts a year at Benaroya. The fall concert traditionally commemorates Kristallnacht, the notorious “night of broken glass” that in 1938 escalated Nazi anti-Jewish violence; the spring concert commemorates Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In addition, Music of Remembrance recently completed the third year of a residency at Shorecrest High School, combining music and history as part of the Shoreline School District’s Holocaust Education Program for high school seniors.
Marc Neikrug’s “Through Roses” premiered in 1980 in London, followed by a U.S. premiere at the 92nd St. Y in New York, which commissioned the work. A made-for-television documentary film of the London premiere was shown many times in Europe, winning a “Best Music” award in France’s Besancon Festival, and a Golden Bear in the New York Television Film Festival.
Meanwhile, a second film was made, featuring Maximilian Schell and directed by Jurgen Flimm, expanded “Roses” with more music and more characters. David Watkin (Chariots of Fire, Moonstruck, Out of Africa) provided cinematography. But despite a few showings, including at his own Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Neikrug laments that this production “was never really released and is in a kind of limbo, involved in some terrrible and complex fights between some of the producers.”
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem, has a copy, however.
“Existence can be a strange thing,” muses Neikrug. “I actually am very sad and disturbed by the fate of that film, as it is an excellent one.”
In its original concert form, “Through Roses” will be performed one time only in Seattle, on Sun. Nov. 2 at 7:30 p.m. at the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, with preconcert lecture by Neikrug at 6:45 p.m.
Performers include returning MOR regulars Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Laura deLuca, clarinet; and Jody Schwarz, flute; as well as the MOR debuts of cellist Amos Yang and oboist Nathan Hughes, both of the Seattle Symphony, percussionist Matthew Kocmieroski and pianist Craig Sheppard. Tickets are $25 each, with the two-concert season available for $45. Information and reservations on the phone at 206-365-7770, or at the newly revised Web site, www.musicofremembrance.org.