2015-16 Season Annual Report ® Mina Miller Mission President & Artistic Director Founded in 1998 by pianist Mina Miller, Music of Remembrance (MOR) fills a unique role throughout the world by remembering the Holocaust through music with concert performances, educational programs, recordings and commissions of new works. Along with 2015-16 its large and varied repertoire of Holocaust-era music, MOR commissions and premieres Board of Directors new Holocaust-inspired works by some of today’s leading composers, building bridges across David Epstein Chair generations and sharing stories that underline the Holocaust’s urgent moral relevance for us Nickolas Newcombe now. Vice Chair Pamela Center Secretary While MOR has a special place in the Jewish community, its mission is not religious and Thea Fefer Treasurer its scope is not limited to Jewish music or experience. Our programs have also focused on Henry Butler the Holocaust’s impact on homosexuals, women, children, Roma, political prisoners and Carole Ellison courageous free-thinkers. Toni Freeman Alice Greenwood Musicians’ resistance took many forms, and crossed many national and religious boundaries. Russell Lebert This resistance cannot have been in vain. We remember these musicians by preserving and Earl Sedlik performing their music. Sandra Spear Leo Sreebny Kyoko Taguchi A Letter from the Chair of the Board Petra Walker Gregory Wallace “Potentia Tenebras Repellendi” – the power to repel the darkness. For more than Frederick Yudin three years this Latin phrase was front and center in my thoughts, for it was the motto of the Stanley Zeitz submarine on which I served as a young naval officer, a motto engraved on David Sabritt our ship’s logo, a phrase I saw every day. Little could I have known some forty Executive Advisor years ago how these words would eventually help guide me as the MOR board Advisory Board chair in carrying out our mission, and how they complemented our stellar Leon Botstein 18th season and the landmark MOR Seattle and San Francisco premieres of Samuel Brylawski Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s extraordinary Out of Darkness. John Corigliano Bob Goldfarb As we follow the news today and are reminded of familiar, ominous David Epstein Richard Goode undercurrents both at home and abroad, I would argue that the arts in Speight Jenkins general, and Music of Remembrance in particular, take on a role even more powerful than Gary Karr Thomas Pasatieri that submarine. Rather than simply having the power to repel darkness, MOR – with your Murray Perahia continued support – first shines a light on injustice and exposes it for what it is, and then, Steve Reich through music, pivots and radiates as a beacon of hope for the future. We reject injustice – Paul Schoenfield Gerard Schwarz past and present — in all forms, we rejoice through our inspirational, uplifting performances, David Shifrin and most importantly, we remember. We remember. David Stock* Bret Werb I thank you again for the trust you have placed in us to ensure the voices of musical witness be Pinchas Zukerman heard, and am honored by your ongoing interest, and look forward – yes, forward – to seeing you at an upcoming performance of MOR, an organization vital for our times. *in blessed memory (1939-2015) David Epstein 2016-17 Board Chair 2 MOR 2015-16 Season Annual Report A Letter from the President and Artistic Director When the witnesses disappear and only witnesses to those first-generation witnesses can speak, art’s role is to create a humanizing space. While art evokes memory, it invents a memory for the future. – Bracha L. Ettinger, The New York Times (December 2016) When I take a step back and reflect on MOR’s programs for its eighteenth season, I’m reminded of the distance we’ve traveled over those years. We’ve remained consistently true to our founding mission of remembering Holocaust-era musicians by performing their works, but over the last decade and a half the world has changed and we have evolved with it. Many of the banned composers whose works we’ve featured from the beginning have become more broadly known, and we’d like to think that we’ve played a small part in rescuing beautiful music and important stories from undeserved obscurity. But we do much more than bring back musical voices from the past. MOR is the only organization in the world with a commitment to commissioning new Holocaust-inspired works by some of today’s leading composers (and lyricists and choreographers!). We try to share stories that teach important lessons and challenge us to question our thinking. Appropriately, we remember the courage of musicians and others who used their art to speak out against injustice that they saw and experienced. At Music of Remembrance, we feel a calling to honor their examples by responding to events that challenge human rights and dignity in our own world. In MOR’s recent season we brought forth two more new works. For our November 2015 concert, the provocative choreographer Olivier Wevers breathed exciting new life Mina Miller into the jazzy ballet suite La Revue de Cuisine by Bohuslav Martinu˚ , a Czech-born composer forced to flee Europe after the German invasion of France because of his active role there in the Czech underground. May 2016 saw the world premiere of our newest opera commission, Out of Darkness by the acclaimed team of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, in Seattle and San Francisco. With its haunting portrait of the experience of homosexuals during Nazi rule and its aftermath, and its intimate depiction of the emotional costs of survival, Out of Darkness reminds us why the Holocaust’s lessons remain as important today as ever. Looking ahead to 2017, our audiences in Seattle and San Francisco will experience our newest commission, a multi-media work by rising young American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian about the fate of Europe’s Roma during the Holocaust. And the following year will bring two more new works, this time focusing on the wartime internment of people of Japanese ancestry. Our programs always combine new works like these with the music of composers whose lives were touched directly by the Holocaust: those who perished; those forced into exile; those whose music was banned and whose lives the Nazis sought to erase; those who stood up to evil through their art. We do all of this because it matters so deeply. Our performances, and the new works that we commission, don’t simply remember and honor the past. They address questions for today, in a world where human rights demand our vigilance more than ever. Through music, we try to make a difference in the world. Mina Miller Artistic Director MOR 2015-16 Season Annual Report 3 A REPORT ON MOR’S 2015-16 SEASON Since its 1998-99 inaugural year, MOR has presented two major concerts annually at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall: a fall concert marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) and a spring concert honoring Holocaust Remembrance Day. Beginning in 2015, we introduced an annual appearance in San Francisco. Our expanded programming in two cities gives us the flexibility to offer varied events — staged operas and musical dramas, new dance creations, chamber and vocal Rikki Ward photo Rikki Ward music — without compromising our ability to continue exploring a core repertoire that fuses known works with new discoveries. Everyone touched by the Holocaust had a November 8, 2015: (Benaroya Hall): La Revue de Cuisine story, a name: those Music of Remembrance launched its 18th season with a concert showcasing dance-inspired who perished and music by three composers. Our November program featured Bohuslav Martinu˚ ’s 1927 jazzy those who survived; ballet La Revue de Cuisine, our first collaboration with the innovative choreographer Olivier famous people Wevers and his provocative Whim W’Him Seattle Contemporary Dance. With dazzling and people little- wit, Wevers’ dances depicted the amorous known who were entanglements of four kitchen utensils brought just as important. to life. Would the orderly Broom help the All of them had dreams, stories to jealous Lid regain the love of the Pot, who had tell, and unanswered succumbed to the temptations of the seductive questions that still Whisk? The music captured the exuberance of need to be asked. 1920s Paris that made it so alluring to artists Through music, we and intellectuals from everywhere. But with the try to remind the German invasion of France in 1940, Martinu˚ was world that their lives forced to flee because of his associations with the still matter. Czech underground. Concert photography: Michael Beaton – Mina Miller Franz Schreker was one of Nazism’s earliest musical casualties, forced to resign as director of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in 1932 when he resisted demands to carry out discriminatory policies against Jewish faculty members. His early chamber work The Wind was inspired by a poem by ballerina Grete Wiesenthal for her own now-lost dance score. We also performed Dutch composer Dick Kattenburg’s innocently unpretentious Deux Valses à la Ravel for piano four hands. Kattenburg experienced the early war years in hiding in Amsterdam, followed by deportation to Westerbork and then Auschwitz, where he was murdered on arrival. He perished at age 24 without hearing these pieces or most of his other music performed, and it’s only through a remarkable chain of coincidence that the scores were recovered years later. The program also included a selection of songs in Yiddish from the Vilna ghetto. Vilna’s Jews held out in proud struggle to defend a unique heritage, and within the ghetto’s walls poetry and music took on special importance. These songs embody the courageous resilience of those who bared their souls through music, and bring us on an inspiring journey that Left to right: Mikhail Shmidt, Leonid Keylin, Julia Benzinger, Jonathan Green, Mara Finkelstein and spans heartbreak, hope, defiance and even Susan Gulkis Assadi humor.