UMaine’s “Thwarted Voices” Features Lost Music of the Holocaust Era
Contact: Phillip Silver, 581- 1783; George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
ORONO — This year’s “Thwarted Voiced” concert Oct. 22 at the University of Maine features the works of Holocaust-era composers whose work can be publicly enjoyed after a half century of suppression.
UMaine music professor and pianist Phillip Silver, an internationally recognized scholar and authority on Holocaust-era composers, will be joined on stage by cellist Noreen Silver and internationally known soprano Deborah Cook.
The concert is at 2 p.m. at Minsky Recital Hall in the Class of 1944 Hall on the Orono campus. Admission is $6 and free for students with a UMaine identification card.
Now in its seventh season, “Thwarted Voices” is a deeply personal concert series for Silver, and an opportunity to perform the “forgotten music” composed by Jewish musicians victimized by the Holocaust in Europe. Some composers perished in Nazi concentration camps and others escaped by fleeing, in some cases to America or Israel. Much of their music has remained unperformed, even undiscovered, over the years.
In murdering or exiling many Jewish composers in Germany, or banning their works, Nazis denied the world an extraordinary range of music by “hundreds upon hundreds of composers” just now being recognized by scholars, Silver says.
This year’s concert focuses on composers who found refuge from the Holocaust in Israel.
They include: Haim Alexander, born in Berlin 1915 and still active today (“Six Israeli Dances for Piano”); Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), elected honorary president of the Israel Academy of Music shortly before his death in 1951 (“Four Songs op. 2,” described as very warm Romantic pieces); Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984), who, like Haim Alexander, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and found sanctuary in Israel (“Sonatina for Piano Solo”); Mark Kopytman, born in Poland in 1929 and part of the first wave of Soviet Jewish composers able to leave for the West after many years of anti-Semitic oppression (“Kaddish” for cello and piano, an immensely poignant work written upon the death of the composer’s father); and Marc Lavry (1903-1967), who came to Israel in the 1930s and established himself as one of the most popular of Israeli composers (“Suite for Piano, Israeliana”).
With the exception of the Schoenberg piece, “a work that basks in late-Romantic lushness,” all the music is influenced by folklore and melody, Silver says.
Contrary to some perceptions, the music of the Holocaust era is varied — much of it bright and spirited — unlike the dark and melancholy images of the Holocaust, says Silver.
Silver has obtained some of his Thwarted Voices music exclusively from relatives of Holocaust-era composers. He is a member of the advisory board of The Inextinguishable Symphony Project, an educational project about the J