Never forgetting by living, creating for today

By Melinda Bargreen, Seattle Times music critic

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

A look at the program makes it immediately apparent why the small-scale Music of Remembrance series has found such a secure niche in the Seattle musical scene in the past seven years. Series director and pianist Mina Miller has taken what could have been a one-note, depressing theme — keeping alive the voices of the Holocaust — and turned it into a vibrant forum for new work, performed by some of the region's best artists.

Monday night's program, in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day, offered three world premieres and a West Coast premiere. The performers included instrumentalists and singers from the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, Northwest Sinfonietta and the University of Washington faculty.

The opening work, the new "In Memoriam" of Gerard Schwarz, marks the first Seattle performance (to this writer's knowledge) of any composition by the Seattle Symphony music director. Making it a family affair, Schwarz's young son, Julian, was the cello soloist in this work for cello and string quartet — a work that also commemorates the late cellist David Tonkonogui, Julian's first cello teacher and a member of the Symphony's cello section.

"In Memoriam" starts with an extended meditation for the cello; the string quartet enters, and the music arches upward, returning gradually to the opening theme. The music is tonal, technically assured and beautiful to hear, and Julian Schwarz played it remarkably well. The quartet, all excellent players, included violinists Jeannie Wells Yablonsky and Leonid Keylin, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi and cellist Mara Finkelstein.

David Schiff's picturesque, energetic Divertimento from "Gimpel the Fool" got a terrific performance from the ensemble, which included powerful pianist Craig Sheppard and the feisty clarinetist Laura DeLuca.

Lori Laitman's "The Seed of Dream," a new song cycle inspired by the poetry of Abraham Sutzkever, featured baritone Erich Parce with cellist Amos Yang and Miller at the piano in a deeply moving performance. Laitman illuminated the heart-wrenching poems with her music; Parce's immaculate diction and rich baritone did the rest, while Yang's exquisitely played cello provided a wordless counterpoint to it all.

After this, even an excellent performance of Erwin Schulhoff's String Quartet No. 1 was a bit anticlimactic. So was a long set of Czech and German cabaret music from the Terezin concentration camp, some of it heard for the first time in new English translations by Kobi Luria. Parce and mezzo-soprano Julie Mirel, both experts at putting across a song, joined Miller for performances of mordant irony.