UMaine ‘Thwarted Voices’ Concert Highlights Music of the Holocaust
Contact: Phillip Silver, 581-1783; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — University of Maine music professor and pianist Phillip Silver’s annual “Thwarted Voices,” music of the Holocaust era concert, this year features a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s extraordinary song cycle “Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok.”
The concert is Sunday, Oct. 21, at 2 p.m. in Minsky Recital Hall in the Class of 1944 Hall, adjacent to the UMaine Memorial Union and Maine Center for the Arts buildings on the Orono campus. Admission is $6 and UMaine students are admitted free with a MaineCard. More information is available from the Maine Center for the Arts box office (581-1755).
Silver’s annual concert highlights music — sometimes including newly discovered music — by victims of Nazi and Soviet anti-Semitism.
Included in this year’s concert is a performance of Shostakovich’s “Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok,” which Silver characterizes as “sweet and deeply personal meditations about love, intimacy, friendship and the power of art, all surrounded and threatened by prophetic intimations of disaster and the darkness of the night.”
The Seven Romances were composed in 1967 by Shostakovich, who was asked by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife soprano Galina Vishnevskaya to write them a “vocalize” they could perform. The result was to set Russian poet Alexander Blok’s love poem “Ophelia’s Song” to music. He also arranged another Blok poem for voice and piano for himself to perform with Vishnevskaya. A third followed, for violin and voice. In a final seventh song in a series, he put a hymn to music, for soprano accompanied by the piano, violin and cello.
Bringing the series to life at Minsky Recital Hall with Silver is cellist Noreen Silver, also of the university’s School of Performing Arts faculty, Ferdinand Liva, first violinist with the DaPonte String Quartet in Damariscotta, and internationally acclaimed soprano Deborah Cook, well-known for her celebrated performance career and her teaching of voice in the United States, London and Germany. Silver has known both Liva and Cook personally for many years.
Also on the program is Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim’s atmospheric “Melody and Variations” for piano solo, Maurice Ravel’s “Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano,” and music by the Italian-Jewish composer Leone Sinigaglia.
Sinagaglia was a victim of the Nazis and the Silvers, along with Ferdinand Liva, will be recording a CD of his chamber music this coming spring.