Thwarted Voices” to Debut Holocaust-Era Composers on Sunday
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — “Spitting in the face of Hitler” was how Phillip Silver, an assistant professor of music at the University of Maine, felt last year when he brought life to music of Holocaust-era composers killed or banished in Nazi Germany.
This year, as he prepares for his fourth annual “Thwarted Voices” concert, Sunday, Feb. 1 at Minsky Recital Hall, he wonders how music of the 20th Century might have changed had the hundreds of musical scores banned by the Third Reich been given the exposure they deserved 60 years ago.
“The more I have worked on this, it seems that the Nazis may have altered the course of musical development over the 20th Century,” he says.
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 like Silver, he says. Silver also is a member of the International Forum for Suppressed Music, a London-based organization dedicated to rectifying what members call the musical injustice inflicted by the Nazis.
More than a half century after the Holocaust, Silver says he is committed to “denying evil its final victory” by giving voice to music that has been silent for decades.
By performing some of the work in “Thwarted Voices,” Silver believes he can contribute to the continuing evolution of the music. The concert will feature the American premiere of at least two works by persecuted Jewish composers, James Simon, who was murdered at the Auschwitz extermination camp, and Georg Tintner, who escaped the Nazi roundup of Jews, and died in the 1990s.
The works of three other composers suppressed by the Third Reich — Paul Ben-Haim, Viktor Ullmann and the better-known Felix Mendelssohn — are on the program. Sunday’s concert begins at 2 p.m. and primarily features works for solo piano. Cellist Noreen Silver, an instructor in the university music department, will accompany Phillip Silver in several pieces for piano and cello.
What is unique about the Thwarted Voices concert, Silver says, is that much of the music from the Holocaust-era musicians is not generally available to the public. Other than the work of Mendelssohn, most has never been recorded. For instance, Silver obtained a photocopy of a hand-written score by Georg Tintner from Tintner’s widow, now living in Canada.
Silver describes composer Paul Ben-Haim as Israel’s first major composer, and Viktor Ullmann, who died at the Auschwitz concentration camp, as having become “one of the more intriguing figures over the last decade or so.”
Ullmann’s works include “20 miraculous pieces,” including two symphonies and an opera composed in the Terezin concentration camp near Prague. Silver will play Ullmann’s Fourth Piano Sonata on Sunday. It was the last piece he wrote before being shipped to Terezin, where he spent two years before being sent finally to Auschwitz, Silver says.
While the music of Mendelssohn, whose music was banned by the Third Reich, has charmed modern audiences for decades, the music of many of the Holocaust composers is equally inspiring, Silver says. Other than a musical lament to an ill and dying sister, by James Simon, the music set for Sunday’s performance is far from melancholy, Silver says.
“The other pieces are, I would say, quite extroverted, even sensual,” he says. “I won’t present anything that isn’t worth hearing. It doesn’t help the reputations of the composers if it’s not good. This is exceptional music.”
Tickets for Sunday’s performance are $6 and are available at the door or through the Maine Center for the Performing Arts Box Office at 581-1755 or (800) MCA-TIXX.