The First World War, which had 40 million casualties, was called “the war to end all wars.”
The war that started just two decades later resulted in more than 70 million deaths and ended as a damaged and shocked world once again hoped for “no more.”
Today, as war engulfs Europe again, musicians remember and keep alive the memory and works of composers who were victims of past cataclysms. Three such events are coming to Northern California this month:
— On April 10, James Conlon directs a chamber orchestra of students from Los Angeles’ Colburn School in a Recovered Voices program at UC Davis’s Mondavi Center, performing music by composers who were displaced by the Holocaust or who perished in the Nazi concentration camps where 6 million Jews and millions of others were murdered.
— On April 11, a smaller Colburn chamber ensemble performs another Recovered Voices program at the Mondavi Center.
— On April 28, in the San Francisco War Memorial Veterans Building, “Rise Up and Resist,” a commemorative concert, will mark the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which contributed to a death toll in the hundreds of thousands during the ghetto’s existence.
Conlon, 73, artistic director of the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices at Colburn, has long been one of the leading lights in the effort to “recover” those silenced voices.
He first became involved some three decades ago when, as a music director of orchestras in Europe, he became a fan of Alexander Zemlinsky’s music. When he returned to the U.S. to lead Los Angeles Opera and guest conduct around the world, he paid more and more attention to “silenced voices,” saying in 2008:
“Entire civilizations, along with their masterpieces, have been destroyed by war since the beginning of human history. Various forms of censorship have repeatedly affected artists and works and continue to do so.”
That backward look also accurately forecast the present day, when Ukrainian artists are killed or driven to become refugees as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country continues, and Russian musicians at home and around the world must choose between loyalty to Putin or escaping Russia, losing contact with their colleagues, friends, and homeland.
Conlon told SF Classical Voice this weekend: “My primary mission is to restore important music to the classical music canon that has been neglected or performed less frequently than it deserves to be. It can also serve as a reminder of the dangers of victimizing artists and their works for racist or political motives.”
The programs in Davis are:
April 10 — Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Much Ado About Nothing Suite (for chamber orchestra), Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1, and Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony
April 11 — Zemlinsky’s Maiblumen Blühten Überall (for voice and string sextet), Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (for string sextet), and Korngold’s String Sextet.
Mondavi Center Executive Director Don Roth writes:
I’ve been listening to the music programmed on these concerts, and I believe that these will be among the very top musical events of this 20th-anniversary season.
After you experience these concerts, you won’t believe that, with the exception of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, you have never heard any of this music and very likely not even of several of the composers (Zemlinsky, Schreker).
With James Conlon preparing the ensembles from the Colburn School, the musical quality will be excellent; and with Conlon on the podium (and giving the keynote at the Recovered Voices Symposium), we will learn the stories of these pieces and these composers who, despite the roadblocks set up by the Nazis, created masterworks.
We’ve made these concerts free, thanks to the generous donors to our Artistic Ventures Fund, because we wanted to lower the barriers to attending concerts of mostly unknown [music] and we wanted this rare opportunity [the only chance to hear these performances outside of L.A.] to be open to as many audience members as possible.”
Thanks to Conlon, the Colburn School project, and many other campaigns, eight decades after the Holocaust, repressed and silenced voices are being heard again in the music of:
Pál Hermann, Erwin Schulhoff, Walter Kaufmann, Viktor Ullmann, Dick Kattenburg, Mieczysław Weinberg, Gideon Klein, Paul Ben-Haim, Szymon Laks, Renzo Massarani, Walter Arlen, Berthold Goldschmidt, Ilse Weber, Hanns Eisler, Ernst Krenek, and many others experiencing new popularity.
Immediately after the concerts in Davis, these events are planned in Los Angeles:
— On April 12, the Colburn Orchestra performs Korngold, Schoenberg, and Schreker at Zipper Hall.
— On April 16, there is a Yom HaShoah commemoration, with world-premiere arrangements of Holocaust survivor Herbert Zipper’s Dachau Lied, at Holocaust Museum LA, performed by Colburn musicians.
San Francisco Opera and Taube Philanthropies are joining in presenting an event that commemorates the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was the first armed resistance by Jews against Nazi oppressors after a three-year ordeal in which the German military, with Polish collaborators, imprisoned and murdered Jews in ghettos in Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, and elsewhere.
The Warsaw Uprising was a major operation by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. The uprising coincided with the retreat of the German forces from Poland ahead of the Soviet advance.
In an unstated but deadly collaboration between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the Red Army halted its advance for two months, allowing the German military to defeat the uprising and destroy the city.
The concert program includes outlawed music performed in the ghetto in defiance of the Nazi regime; music performed by the Jewish Symphony Orchestra in the ghetto; folk music celebrating Jewish, Polish Jewish, and Polish cultural heritage; and popular cabaret songs of the time. Selections include:
— Mieczysław Weinberg’s Aria (for string quartet), Op. 9, and his Sieben Jiddische Lieder, art songs with Yiddish text by Itzhok Lejb Perez
— Karol Szymanowski’s “La fontaine d’Aréthuse” from Mythes, Op. 30, performed on the last concert played by the Jewish Symphony Orchestra in the Warsaw Ghetto
— Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp Minor, the piece Polish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman played for the SS officer who discovered him in hiding in Warsaw
— Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” sung in Yiddish, honoring the Jewish Symphony Orchestra’s plans, never able to be realized, to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the fourth movement sung in Yiddish
— Popular songs such as “Makh tzu di Eygelekh” (Close your eyes) and “Piosenka a mojej Warszawie” (Song about my Warsaw), composed for the ghetto theater and cabarets of the time by Dovid Beigelman, Henryk Wars, and Albert Harris
— The religious song “Ani Ma’amin” (I believe) with Hebrew text from the 13 Articles of Faith
— The Yiddish hymn of the partisans, “Zog nit keynmol” (Never say), about courage, resistance, and resilience.
Participating artists include Adler Fellows Arianna Rodriguez, Mikayla Sager, and Olivia Smith (sopranos); Gabrielle Beteag and Nikola Printz (mezzo-sopranos); Moisés Salazar (tenor); and Jongwon Han (bass-baritone).
Also performing are members of the SF Opera Orchestra: concertmaster Kay Stern, principal second violin Jeremy Preston, associate principal viola Joy Fellows, acting principal cello Thalia Moore, and principal clarinet José González Granero. Additional performers are guitarist David Tannenbaum, accordionist Ron Borelli, and pianists Ronny Michael Greenberg, Yang Lin, Carrie-Ann Matheson, and Marika Yasuda.
Tickets are $36, available at the SF Opera box office (301 Van Ness Ave.), by phone at (415) 864-3330, and online.
Polish President Andrzej Duda will preside over the official commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the nation’s capital on April 19. Cultural institutions in Poland, Germany, the United States, and Israel will participate in international commemorations of the anniversary.
