Classical Music Review: Remembering the Dead

There have been a lot of new works presented on Seattle concert stages this month. Seattle Opera’s Amelia opened last weekend to strong reviews, Eric Banks Haptadama (not a premiere, but a recent creation) opened,and last Monday, Music of Remembrance concluded their twelfth season by showcasing a brand new commission from Lori Laitman based on Vedem (Czech for “In the Lead”) — an underground journal written by teenage boys imprisoned in the Terezin concentration camp. 

Read the review after the jump.

MOR concerts are at their best when they don’t stray far from the composers of the Holocaust era who wrote music within a political and social context that few of us living today can imagine. They are exhibits for a culture of art and music nearly extinguished by the cruelty and murder of the Holocaust. 

The evening began with a performance of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s Humoresque (number seven, I believe) arranged for violin and piano and Pavel Haas’ Third String Quartet. Before starting, Mina Miller, MOR’s artistic director, explained how Dvorak’s music sustained Emil Kopel — a Terezin survivor and Vedem author — during a forced march across the European countryside. It’s a story few people know, Miller confessed.  It hardly mattered that the performance by Mina Millar and Leonid Keylin wasn’t note perfect when put in the context of such a moving story.

Gerard Schwarz’s In Memoriam served as a bridge to the two halves of the concert. Written only five years ago, the haunting work resembles David Diamond’s Kaddish for cello and orchestra, another languorous piece which remembers the dead.

But it is Vedem, the new work by Lori Laitman, most of the audience came to hear. Vedem is a journal of illustrations, poems and other creations assembled, produced by hand, and read under the cover of night by a hundred boys living in the Terezin concentration camp. Only fourteen of the book’s creators survived, and of those, only six are alive today.

Laitman’s piece translates the journal’s poetry into music and attempts to tell the story of its creators through David Mason’s libretto. Just as Vedem tries to tell its story, it is also angling to make a statement about survival, community and the sustaining ability of art.

The piece worked best when Laitman and Mason relied on material from the journal. It was touching, beautiful, funny, and horrific. Jokes mixed with misery. Memories mingled with nightmares. Laitman channeled through her instrumental and vocal writing both the fate and the legacy of Vedem’s authors.

But when Laitman and Mason deviated from Vedem’s material, the results didn’t fare as well. They couldn’t conjure up the same emotionally honest response in me. At times I felt the music was trying too hard to make a statement which is already implicit in the Vedem story.

When I think about those pieces of music written during or about the Holocaust that resonate most with me, they are always works which let their message speak through the music: Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Erwin Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello, Pavel Haas’ string quartets, Paul Schoenfield’s Ghetto Songs, Camp Songs, Sparks of Glory.

Even as Vedem reaches for a big, profound statement, the instrumental forces Laitman uses — piano, clarinet, violin, and cello — seemed too small for this particular story of survival. I would have preferred a string orchestra or a beefier line-up of instruments.

The vocal forces fared better. Russ Hauck joined as a tenor soloist and Angela Niederloh sang the mezzo soprano role. The bulk of the singing was left to Joseph Crnko’s capable Northwest Boys Choir, for which Laitman’s writing is lovely — with attention to an elongated line that gave the music a drifting, ghostly quality.

“What happens next with Vedem?” I asked myself, walking to my car. There is little doubt the piece will become a staple in MOR’s repertory. A recording is probably not very far off either. Other MOR commissions have been shortlisted for a Pulitzer — Vedem could be the next. But finding a wider audience for Vedem could be difficult, especially because of the piece’s atypical alignment of instruments and vocal forces.

When the concert ended, the crowd erupted into applause and four of the remaining six living Vedem authors came on stage (a little grayer, perhaps, than when they wrote the work initially), I embraced Lori Laitman’s attempt and MOR’s mission.

There is no other organization in America today that has the same conviction for this cause as Music of Remembrance. Let’s hope MOR can continue to do its work for twelve more seasons.

Image of Sidney Taussig, Terezin survivor and VEDEM contributor, with a reproduction of a page from the manuscript. Courtesy of Music of Remembrance. Learn more about their VEDEM Project at their Web site.