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Gay couple's tragic fate in Holocaust fuels powerful world premiere

Gay couple's tragic fate in Holocaust fuels powerful world premiere
Morgan Smith, Julian Patrick to Star in Jake Heggie's New Work at Music of Remembrance Concert Forbidden! A concert to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day Monday, May 7, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, Seattle Tickets: $25; 206-365-7770 or www.musicofremembrance.org Battles over the heart take the spotlight at this spring's chamber music concert, Forbidden! The Music of Remembrance concert features the world premiere of For a Look or a Touch, a new commission from the renowned San Francisco composer and pianist Jake Heggie. Performed at the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall-at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle-at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, May 7, this is a one-night-only event. (Heggie will appear for a Meet the Composer pre-concert interview, with Bob Goldfarb, at 6:45 p.m.) Heggie has two hit operas (Dead Man Walking and The End of the Affair) and nearly 200 songs to his name-and no shortage of projects to choose from. Yet when MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller asked him about this commission, he said yes immediately. "This project had deep resonance for me as a Gay man, somebody who grew up in fear of being mocked, ridiculed and physically harmed because of my sexual orientation," said Heggie. "The title comes from a line in the documentary Paragraph 175: 'You could be arrested for a look or a touch.' Under the Nazis, innuendo was enough to convict a person." Written for a piano quintet (with flute, clarinet, violin, cello), the score evokes the romantic lyricism of songs from the late 1930s, with a wild dance piece reminiscent of pre-war life in Berlin, when the city was a Gay mecca. The composer collaborated with librettist Gene Scheer, with whom he has written two song cycles and a one-act opera (To Hell and Back); the two are now working on a chamber opera for the Houston Grand Opera and San Francisco Opera called Last Acts. In making the commission, Mina Miller referred Heggie to Manfred Lewin's journal on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. When Scheer and Heggie read it, they knew they had found the central narrative they wanted to tell-though they also drew on the stirring stories told in Paragraph 175. In the journal, Lewin recounts his life with Gad Beck in Berlin in the 1940s. Both were arrested, but only Beck survived. The 19-year-old Manfred was killed by the Nazis. Young baritone Morgan Smith-fresh from his appearances as Don Giovanni in Seattle Opera's new production of Mozart's opera this January-will create the role of Manfred Lewin's ghost. Miller and Heggie chose Smith as their singer following his performances of the title role in last season's Brundibár at MOR. The former Seattle Opera Young Artist made his opera debut at Seattle Opera in 2001, and has since appeared at San Francisco Opera and other companies across the U.S. Julian Patrick, who is 80 himself, acts the non-singing role of Gad Beck, a present-day, 80-year-old Holocaust survivor. A much revered singer from the world of opera and musical theater, Patrick created the role of George in Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men and was in the original casts of Once Upon A Mattress, Bells Are Ringing, and Fiorello. The versatile baritone has performed more than 100 major roles worldwide with major European and U.S. opera companies; in Seattle he's best known for his Alberich in the Rochaix/Israel production of Wagner's Ring cycle. Recently he returned to his first love, Broadway musicals, and performed with Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre as Benjamin Franklin in 1776, Tony in The Most Happy Fella, and Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd. MOR has previously commissioned new music from Paul Schoenfield, Thomas Pasatieri, David Stock, and Lori Laitman, but this commission is the first-by any music organization-to address the impact of the Holocaust on Germany's Gay population. More than one million German Gay men were targeted by the Nazis, and 100,000 were arrested. At least 15,000 male homosexuals were killed. "Our mission is to ensure that the voices of musical witness to the Holocaust are heard," says Mina Miller, "and now Gay men will have this wonderful, poignant work from Jake speaking on their behalf." For its theme of love and Nazi oppression, Forbidden! also highlights Osvaldo Golijov's cinematic Lullaby and Doina, about the doomed love between a young gypsy man and a Jewish woman. Besides incorporating a Yiddish lullaby, the piece ends with a theme that Golijov says he "stole" from his friends, the gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks. Then in Simon Sargon's Shemà, the poet Primo Levi struggles to reconcile his Auschwitz experiences with his religion. Levi wrote most of the poems used in the song cycle in the months just after liberation from Auschwitz; soprano Maureen McKay returns to MOR to sing the piece. The concert also includes Erwin Schulhoff's sparkling, virtuosic Duo for violin and cello, from 1925. Charged with the composer's love of life, it's a musically varied piece-its jazz-influenced sound reflects Schulhoff's rejection of "ivory-tower" composition. Music of Remembrance (MOR) fills a unique spiritual and cultural role in Seattle and throughout the United States by remembering Holocaust musicians and their art through musical performances, educational activities, musical recordings and commissions of new works. Since its 1998/99 inaugural year, MOR has presented two major concerts annually at Seattle's Benaroya Hall, marking the anniversary of Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) each fall and Holocaust Remembrance Day each spring. A MOR press release