Music of Remembrance -works by Sargon, Schulhoff, Golijov, and Heggie : soloists, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 7.05.2007 (BJ)

 

When a composer and his librettist create a work that chronicles and deplores the treatment of homosexuals by the Nazis, they put the reviewer in something of a spot. One would have to be some kind of a heel to respond negatively. As it happens, For a Look or a Touch offers plenty to be positive about, though the local reviewer who came right out, with admirable conviction, and called it “a masterpiece” seemed to me to be drawing it a bit rich.

Hard to categorize, for it sits somewhere among the various genres of chamber opera, cantata, and song-cycle, the piece was composed by the 45-year-old American Jake Heggie in response to a commission from Music of Remembrance, a Seattle organization, directed with imagination by the pianist and musicologist Mina Miller, dedicated to “ensuring that the voices of musical witness be heard.” The group’s activity is focused on music connected with the Holocaust. At this concert, the connection was varied in nature. The world premiere of Heggie’s piece was preceded before intermission by Shemà, Simon Sargon’s cycle of settings of poems by Primo Levi, a Holocaust victim; by the Duo for violin and cello by Ervín Schulhoff, who was fated as both a Jew and a socialist to die in the Holocaust–and it seems to me preferable to keep to the original Czech form of his first name rather than to honor the nation that murdered him by using the Germanic form “Erwin”; and by Osvaldo Golijov’s Lullaby and Doina, where the link is with another group–the Gypsies–who were singled out by the Nazis for persecution, and whose characteristic folk dance the doina supplies some of the Argentinian composer’s material.

All of the works on the program were in one degree or another eloquent and skillfully written, and all were also fortunate on this occasion in their performers, most of whom are members of the Seattle Symphony. Shemà is scored for a soprano solo and a instrumental quartet. Ms. Miller herself was at the keyboard, and she was partnered by flutist Zartouhi Domburian-Eby, clarinetist Laura DeLuca, and cellist Mara Finkelstein, while the vocal part was brilliantly delivered by Maureen McKay, a recent graduate of the Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program. She seems to me headed for a considerable career: clarity of diction and line and powerful emotional commitment were rendered all the more compelling for her ability just to stand there and sing, with none of the distracting mannerisms that undermine the work of too many singers. Sargon’s essentially tonal and consonant musical language is not notably original or individual, but his response to Levi’s charged texts was vivid enough to create a moving effect on the listener.

Schulhoff was a composer of a substantially more personal stamp, especially in his chamber music, which is far finer than his relatively conventional-sounding symphonies. As the “Zingaresca” heading of its second movement indicates, his Duo, like Golijov’s piece, uses some Gypsy material. But by the sheer intensity of his musical personality, Schulhoff made even the borrowed material unmistakably his own, and here an electrifying performance, by the violinist Mikhail Shmidt (obviously having a wonderful time) and his worthy cellist partner Amos Yang had the audience members on the edge of their seats. Schmidt then returned for Golijov’s rewarding piece, in which his partners were Domburian-Eby, DeLuca, Finkelstein, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, and Jonathan Green on double-bass.

If I have left a consideration of Heggie’s new work for last, it is partly because I am not at all sure what to say about it. Dramatically, the libretto, created by Gene Scheer on the basis of documentary materials, presents us with two stage characters, personifying a young homosexual pair of lovers whose lives were destroyed, when they were 19, by the Nazis. A baritone singer represents Manfred Lewin, the one who died. Desperate to be remembered, he returns as a ghost and appears to an actor in the role of Gad Beck, who somehow survived, and who now, at the age of 80, wants only to forget. Their colloquy, at moments desperately sad, at others retrospectively savoring the happiness they had shared, is supported by a quintet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, in which Craig Sheppard joined Domburian-Eby, DeLuca, Shmidt, and Yang.

Dramatically and musically, For a Look or a Touch (the title naming what you could easily be arrested for by the homophobic Nazis) was extremely well crafted and often moving in its evocation of both young love and the grief of an arid old age. At the same time, it seemed to me that there were problems in both dimensions. Heggie commands a fluent and accessible - yet not banal - idiom, and the textures of his quintet writing were beautifully judged. On the other hand, the evocation of 1930s Berlin through the injection of some jazzy clarinet breaks (dazzlingly played by Laura DeLuca) was a distraction from the concentrated musical message. In the most sustained segment of the Manfred Lewin role, moreover, having hit on a meltingly lyrical four-note phrase that listeners must have recognized from its ravishing earlier appearance in Richard Strauss’ September (one of the Four Last Songs), Heggie found himself unable to let it go. He repeated the figure over and over again, with inevitably diminishing effect, where Strauss had employed a more productive sense of proportion.

On stage, meanwhile, splendidly though baritone Morgan Smith and the genuinely 80-year-old Julian Patrick sang, spoke, and played their parts, I felt that there was an inherent problem in what we were seeing. It was hard to keep in mind that these had been two equally young men when they were lovers–what we were observing, in the dramatic present, was an old man and his young lover.

I am not making comparative value judgements that would pit one kind of love against another. It is, however, surely clear that the relationship before our eyes was a very different kind of relationship from the one that had joined Manfred and Gad in their teens. Perhaps it was unimaginative of me not to be able to set the evidence of my eyes more effectively aside. But I am fairly clear that the forthcoming recording of the work will enjoy a considerable advantage over its stage performance, because the disparity between the physical scene and the spiritual and emotional content of the story will no longer be in play. This is one case where a “mere” audio recording is likely to outshine any kind of live staged representation. Certainly there is enough merit in Heggie’s and Scheer’s creation to make me look forward to hearing it again in that other medium.

 

Bernard Jacobson