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Music of Remembrance - works by Sargon, Navok, and Olivero:  Guenter Buchwald, conductor, soloists, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 2.11.2008(BJ)


Dedicated to “ensuring that the voices of musical witness be heard,” the Seattle-based organization Music of Remembrance began its second decade of activity with a program that presented those voices in a variety of manifestations. The purely instrumental meditation Before the Ark, in which Simon Sargon evokes traditional Jewish prayer chant, was followed by Lior Navok’s setting of a note left in a Polish railway station by a mother just before stepping onto the train that would carry her to her death in a concentration camp, in the hope that someone might rescue the child she attached it to. After intermission, another medium was summoned up, with a rare screening of the film Golem: How He Came Into The World, to the accompaniment of a live musical score by Betty Olivero.

Sargon, who was born in India in 1938, teaches composition at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Like the Primo Levi from his pen that MoR performed last year, Before the Ark breaks no new ground but falls easily on the ear. It was given a powerfully committed performance by Leonid Keylin, violin, and Mina Miller, who doubles–or I should say triples–as pianist, as artistic director of MoR, which she founded, and as the organization’s impressively eloquent spokesman: her introductory remarks, delivered with no notes, were admirably pointed and insightful.

It was not easy to understand why Navok (born in Tel Aviv in 1971) chose to set his anonymous text in English, nor were the interjections of plain speech into the music really convincing. But his piece too made a moving impression (perhaps inevitably, given the text) in this performance by soprano Vira Slywotzky, partnered by Miller, violinist Mikhail Shmidt, clarinetist Laura DeLuca, cellist Mara Finkelstein, and mandolinist (if that is the word) Steven Novacek.

For Golem: How He Came Into The World, Betty Olivero (born in Tel Aviv in 1954) created a score that, as she accurately observed in her introductory note, pays homage to three cultural strands, “the 16th-century Jewish legend about the Golem of Prague, Jewish customs and traditions throughout the centuries (up to the early part of the 20th century when the film was made), and German Expressionism.” She adds that, as the drama develops, its “themes–all emerging from traditional tunes from the Jewish folk and klezmer repertoire as well as highly sacred music from ancient Jewish liturgy–weave into each other.”

Guenter Buchwald specializes in conducting live musical accompaniments to silent films. His biography mentions an astonishing repertoire of “more than 2000 films,” and his expertise was certainly borne out in this performance by DeLuca, Schmidt, Keylin, Finkelstein, and violist Susan Gulkis Assadi. In particular, I found the alternation of relatively lugubrious sections with lighter moments of a decidedly Renaissance character most effective.

The film, dating from 1920, is the third “Golem” treatment to have been directed by Paul Wegener, and the only one that has survived. It is a brilliantly concentrated piece of film-making, shot by Karl Freund, who was also the cinematographer for Metropolis and, believe it or not, I Love Lucy. The ancient Jewish community under threat of exile is vividly portrayed, even if the standard repertoire of silent-movie gesture that makes the principal characters so convincingly Jewish also closely resembles those that, in a film like Alexander Nevsky, make the cast look no less convincingly Russian.

It is sad to learn from the program note that Wegener, “once a pacifist, was later honored by Josef Goebbels for his production of Nazi propaganda films.” Wegener himself played the Golem, a clay statue brought to life by Rabbi Loew to save the ghetto Jews from the Emperor’s edict of expulsion. Film buffs may have found his appearance strangely familiar, for he looked disconcertingly like Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. My wife insisted that it was only the hair-style, but I thought a certain studied absence of Affekt helped to make the connection. In any case, Mina Miller has once again put us, not to mention the memory of many long-dead victims of persecution, resoundingly in her debt by presenting on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht this imaginatively conceived and meticulously prepared program.

Bernard Jacobson


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