Dolce Suono's Holocaust concert

Any concert devoted to the Holocaust raises sensitive questions. Are we responding to the music? Or are we reading things into it and responding to the event itself? Are the artists creating music that has true artistic merit, or are we giving them the benefit of the doubt because they've associated their work with a good cause?

Those of us who are not Jewish face an additional pitfall: We can slip into a satisfying glow of self-appreciation as we note that we're feeling the proper emotions.

Fortunately, Mimi Stillman seems to understand the issues. According to her opening remarks, she spent a year planning Dolce Suono's Holocaust program with guest soprano Lucy Shelton and Dolce Suono's composer in residence, Shulamit Ran. Stillman also consulted with scholars at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and other authorities.

Stillman didn't mention it, but she and her collaborators contributed another factor that was just as important: the formidable artistic taste and knowledge they brought to the project.

The result was a concert that avoided all the traps and passed the ultimate test for a concert devoted to an emotionally charged historic event: Most of the music on the program would have been worth hearing even if you didn't know its relationship to the Holocaust.

Into the gas chambers

Four of the program's five sections featured music by Holocaust victims or survivors. Their music formed a collective testament to the culture destroyed by the Holocaust and the wealth the world could have harvested if the creative genius of the victims had been allowed to live and flourish.

The opening song— Autumn, by Viktor Ullmann (murdered at Auschwitz in 1944)— was a beautiful German lieder on a classic subject. The second item, Love Song by Andre Previn (who escaped with his family), mingled slight hints of cabaret with a blend of the lieder and Jewish traditions.

Wiegala, by Ilse Weber (murdered at Auschwitz), is a bouncy lullaby by a children's author who sang to the imprisoned children and, according to witnesses, sang this song with a group of children as she accompanied them to the gas chambers.

Other songs on the program dealt with loneliness and separation, but in such universal terms that you wouldn't have known they had anything to do with the Holocaust if you hadn't read the program notes.

Touches of klezmer

The program included two instrumental works: a sonata for flute and piano by Leon Smit (murdered at Sobibor), played by Mimi Stillman and Charles Abramovic, and a string trio by Gideon Klein (murdered at Furstgengrube), played by violinist Noah Geller, violist Burchard Tang and cellist Yumi Kendall.

The sonata was a good display piece for Stillman and Abramovic, with a high-speed ending for the flutist and a middle movement that included blues touches and clever little comments from the piano. The string trio contains touches of klezmer music in the first movement and continues the folk associations with a second movement series of variations on a Moravian folk tune that gathers depth as the movement progresses. The third movement rests on a pulsing drive that seems fraught with meaning.

The Klein trio's three musicians were all Dolce Suono regulars and leading Philadelphia Orchestra chamber enthusiasts. They approached Klein's work with the insight of experienced chamber musicians who grasp the composer's intentions and understand how the different parts fit together.

Lucy Shelton is such an accomplished specialist in new music that there's a natural tendency to focus on her when she sings in front of a piano. But everything she did gained from the sensitive touch that Charles Abramovic brought to the accompaniments.

Power of emotions

The only piece that dealt directly with the Holocaust was the finale, Shulamit Ran's 1970 song cycle, O, the Chimneys.

Ran's work sets five poems by Nelly Sachs, the Nobel Prize poet who escaped from Germany with her parents in 1940 and spent most of her creative life writing about the Holocaust. None of the poems jumped out at me when I read the English translations, but no matter: Ran's music communicated the full blast of her feelings.

Ran scored the piece for a chamber ensemble that gave her an exceptionally broad range of colors and possibilities: soprano, flute, cello, piano, percussion and the standard bass clarinets. She exploited all the ensemble's capabilities for variety and change of pace, and she employed modern vocal techniques like flutter tonguing and a brief moment when Shelton sings into the piano.

But nobody will listen to this piece because they admire Ran's technical skill and musical imagination. It's a successful work of art because it meets the only test that counts when an artist confronts this subject: the power and accuracy of the emotions that Ran dumps into the minds of her listeners.

Ran wisely kept the piece short, to about 20 minutes. Had she composed a longer work, she might have felt she had to temper it with some contrasting, more palatable emotion. No audience could tolerate prolonged exposure to the levels of anguish and horror evoked by O the Chimneys.