It may be hard to believe that music created by people facing death could be fun, vibrant and joyous.
Mina Miller insists that if audiences come and listen to this music, they will leave believers.
“It’s a message that also tells us that within ourselves today we have the same power, the same strength to renew our spirit under all kinds of adverse conditions. This is an incredible lesson from the Holocaust,” said Miller, an authority on music from the Holocaust.
Anyone who stops by Seattle’s Frye Art Museum on Saturday can listen to, and learn this lesson from, this “lost” music. The entertainment is not only uplifting, but it’s free.
Music of Remembrance is an organization whose goal is to remember Holocaust musicians and their art through musical performances, educational activities, musical recordings and commissions of new works.
“We’re committed,” said Miller, who is MOR’s artistic director. “We hope the public takes advantage of it and comes.
“… We want this music to be heard by the widest possible audience.”
Miller emphasized that the program is also for families with children, to expose children to some incredible musicians and a little bit of history.
The music is translated. In each 90-minute concert, Miller shares her insights on the works performed, including mini history lessons of the composer and context for the music’s creation.
“This is not highbrow and it’s very accessible,” Miller said. “It’s a meaningful afternoon, with great music that’s easy to listen to.”
She described Holocaust victim Erwin Schulhoff as one of the most innovative composers of his time. He was banned as a degenerate and slated for death because he was a Jew and a socialist. One piece he wrote includes a tango and a Charleston.
“The music is wild, absolutely wild,” Miller said. “For 1923, it really sparkles.”
Other composers of that tragic time, such as Gideon Klein, Hans Krsa and Viktor Ullmann, created strikingly beautiful works, all while imprisoned in the Nazi camps where they ultimately died.
“The music of these artists is a potent legacy – art speaking out against inhumanity, celebrating beauty, weeping at incalculable loss,” Miller said.
The program features a mixture of vocal and instrumental music by Klein, Krsa, Ullmann and Schulhoff, and also by Ilse Weber and Carlo Taube.
Many of these works were composed in Terez’n, the concentration camp outside Prague in what’s now the Czech Republic. The haunting chamber music, and songs in Yiddish and German, communicate an extraordinary range of emotions – nostalgia, hope, despair – from Terez’n life.
“It’s also joyous, though intense,” Miller said. “It really is a way of affirming life.”
The Sparks of Glory series will be hosted by the Frye on three Saturday afternoons this season inside the museum’s intimate 140-seat auditorium.
The players, drawn largely from the Seattle Symphony and Seattle’s leading chamber groups, provide a level of musicianship to match the works’ intensity.
Arts writer Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com.
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