Holocaust Cantata

Editorial Reviews
About the Artist
The Master Chorale Chamber Singers (formerly the Washington Singers) was founded in 1980 by Paul Hill (1933-1999), and is one of the country's premier, fully professional vocal ensembles. The ensemble has been featured in concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington Chamber Symphony, Joffrey Ballet, and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and has performed frequently at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and various embassies in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The ensemble has also been broadcast nationally on The First Art radio series.

Donald McCullough, music director of the Master Chorale of Washington and the Master Chorale Chamber Singers, came to Washington in 1996 from Norfolk, Virginia, where he founded the acclaimed McCullough Chorale, Virginia's only fully professional choral ensemble, in 1984, and the Virginia Symphony Chorus in 1990. He is an active composer and arranger (several other compositions are featured on this recording) with a number of published titles to his credit, including the Holocaust Cantata, which received its world premiere at the Kennedy Center in 1998. He is a member of the board of directors of Chorus America, and holds degrees from Stetson University and Southern Methodist University. He has studied conducting with Robert Page and music composition with Adolphus Hailstork and Alice Parker.

Album Description
The Holocaust Cantata uses the words and music of actual concentration camp inmates to create a wholly original and powerful work. Using material found within the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Donald McCullough's Holocaust Cantata traverses one of the bleakest episodes in human history. Yet the piece also evokes a sense of music's life-affirming power, even in the face of absolute despair, to express what words alone cannot.

McCullough discovered the material within the vast Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection in the museum's archives. Kulisiewicz himself had performed as a kind of camp troubador during his own incarceration at Sachsenhausen, and, after the war, spent several years interviewing fellow survivors about music in the camps, gathering together the scattered remnants of this music.

As McCullough painstakingly sifted through this material-much of which was uncatalogued-the arresting melodies and compelling testimonies that make up the Holocaust Cantata gradually began to emerge. "I wanted the Cantata to speak with a sense of immediacy," says McCullough, explaining his decision to set the choral texts and spoken testimonies in English, and his hope is that the piece may "transform statistics into people in the minds of the Cantata's listeners, and perhaps be a part of making it more difficult for such a horror ever to occur again." The Washington Post, reviewing the world premiere in March 1998, called it "an experience that should linger long in the audience's memory and should be regularly revived."

Holocaust Cantata, Music, Steven Combs, Miriam Bolkosky, Michael Horvit, Szymon Laks, Donald McCullough, Sara Murphy, Robert Lamar Sims, Angela Powell, Choral, Choral Music, Classical, Classical Artists, Classical Vocals, Vocal, Vocal Music

Average customer rating: A Timely Performance Outstanding; a soon to be classic Uninspired tedium Holocaust Cantata: A Five Star Work of Art An excerpt from my liner notes...

Holocaust Cantata Manufacturer: Albany Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music Similar Items: Composers of the Holocaust: Ghetto Songs & Instrumental Works MUSIC FROM THE HOLOCAUST Rossini: Petite Messe solennelle Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford Historical Monographs) Forbidden Music: Music from Theresienstadt ASIN: B000031VRF Release Date: 1999-11-23

Tracks:

1. The Prisoner Rises
2. Singing Saved My Life
3. Song Of The Polish Prisoners
4. The Execution Of The Twelve
5. In Buchenwald
6. A State Of Seperation
7. The Train
8. Singing From Birth To Death
9. The Striped Ones
10. There's No Life Like Life At Auschwitz
11. Tempo di Tango
12. Letter To Mom
13. Song Of Days Now Gone
14. Passacaille For Cello And Piano
15. Even When God Is Silent
16. A Child's Journey: An Accidental Meeting
17. A Child's Journey: I Once Had A Friend
18. A Child's Journey: There Are No Stars In The Sky
19. Is Not A Flower A Mystery?
20. We Remember Them

Album Description

McCullough discovered the material within the vast Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection in the museum's archives. Kulisiewicz himself had performed as a kind of camp troubador during his own incarceration at Sachsenhausen, and, after the war, spent several years interviewing fellow survivors about music in the camps, gathering together the scattered remnants of this music.

As McCullough painstakingly sifted through this material-much of which was uncatalogued-the arresting melodies and compelling testimonies that make up the Holocaust Cantata gradually began to emerge. "I wanted the Cantata to speak with a sense of immediacy," says McCullough, explaining his decision to set the choral texts and spoken testimonies in English, and his hope is that the piece may "transform statistics into people in the minds of the Cantata's listeners, and perhaps be a part of making it more difficult for such a horror ever to occur again." The Washington Post, reviewing the world premiere in March 1998, called it "an experience that should linger long in the audience's memory and should be regularly revived."

Customer Reviews:

A Timely Performance.......2001-11-18

Outstanding; a soon to be classic.......2000-05-04

Uninspired tedium.......2000-04-28

Holocaust Cantata: A Five Star Work of Art.......2000-01-07

An excerpt from my liner notes..........1999-11-25

Notes on the Music

It is well-known that during the Holocaust inmates wrote music while incarcerated in concentration camps. Much of it has since been recorded. At Theresienstadt, for instance-the infamous "Paradise Ghetto"-the Nazis organized an orchestra made up of young musicians who had studied under such luminaries as Leos Janacek and Arnold Schoenberg. Most of these musicians, among them such promising students as Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann, perished during the Holocaust, leaving behind but a few pieces, composed under duress and co-opted by the Nazis for their own propaganda purposes. What might they have eventually accomplished had they survived? Such classical music-beautiful as it is-was the product of formally trained musicians. What about the music of the common man-music embraced by the whole community and passed secretly by aural transmission-music that carried with it powerful words revealing different aspects of camp life, or expressing the inmates' innermost feelings, of mourning, or resistance, or patriotism? Was there other Holocaust music, akin to the spirituals that sprang from slavery in America, that spoke with the same startling immediacy to express the agony of the victims of the Nazi regime?...

McCullough's [quest to answer this question] began with a call to Bret Werb, musicologist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who revealed the existence of the Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection in the museum archives. Kulisiewicz had traveled about Europe during the postwar period collecting and preserving what he could of the music that had emerged from the Holocaust concentration camps, but little was known about the music itself.

McCullough's first task, then, was to immerse himself in the collection, playing through the hundreds of tunes. He was encouraged to find that they contained some compelling melodies, and for the first time he began to wonder whether a choral cantata-perhaps reflecting the role of music in the camps or evoking the daily lives of these people-might emerge from the material. But he still had no idea what lay within the accompanying text.

At some point, someone had added a rough, English-language index to the collection, but the materials themselves were mostly in Polish. Marcin Zmudzki, a young Pole, was engaged to sift through the mountain of texts. McCullough told the translator that he was interested in anything that had to do with camp life, especially as it related to music. As he recalls, "It was my good fortune that not only was Marcin an excellent translator, but also he had a sense for poetry and thus grasped, very quickly, the type of material I was seeking."

In addition to music, Kulisiewicz also collected interviews, articles, and letters that had anything to do with camp life. With this wealth of material, McCullough decided to place between each musical arrangement readings that also spoke of life in the camps. After considering and rejecting literally hundreds of documents, he finally decided that he had what he needed from the archives. But in a sense, the real work was just beginning. "Because I wanted the Cantata to speak with a sense of immediacy," says McCullough, "I thought it should be sung in English. But before I could arrange a single note of it, I needed to have singable translations. Here I employed the talents of lyricist Denny Clark, who at first worked with Marcin, getting a word by word translation. Knowing which words appear on which notes is important in keeping the overall impact of the song." A trained singer himself, Clark was able to make transliterations to ensure that the best vowels for singing fell on the proper notes, all while remaining faithful to the original text. It was an immensely complicated task....

A few words about the structure of the Cantata. As you listen you should not look for a plot, as such. Because each song and reading represents a different person, a different place, and a different time in the Holocaust experience, you should be wary about viewing the entire piece as a streaming narrative. Nonetheless, certain common truths will begin to emerge, and no doubt others will come to you with each successive hearing. Among these is the certainty that these are nakedly honest responses to the most unthinkable of acts. Sometimes the responses are jarring; who could find humor amid such horror? And yet humor-albeit dark in nature-undoubtedly exists within this work. Nevertheless the inmates' responses never sink to the level of triteness. For them, music functioned as something much more than just a light in the darkness; its very existence was a form of spiritual resistance in an environment where such resistance risked instant extermination.

McCullough's hope is that this work may "transform statistics into people in the minds of the Cantata's listeners, and perhaps be a part of making it more difficult for such a horror ever to occur again." In the end, for me, the work flows inexorably back to its source: it is the voice of humanity, crying out to be heard.

Average customer rating:

Ptaszynska: Holocaust Memorial Cantata Marta Ptaszynska , Yuhudi Menuhin , Robert Gierlach , Ryszard Minkiewicz , and Sinfonia Varsovia, Warsaw Chamber Choir Zofia Kilanowicz Manufacturer: CD Accord ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Chamber Music | Forms & Genres | Classical (c.1770-1830) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music ASIN: B00005A0GS Release Date: 2001-02-27

Tracks:

1. Part I: Not To Forget - Zofia Kilanowicz/Ryszard Minkiewicz/Robert Gierlach/Warsaw Chm Chor/Ryszard Zimak
2. Part I: So Long As You Know - Robert Gierlach
3. Part I: For Many Have Already Forgotten - Zofia Kilanowicz/Ryszard Minkiewicz/Robert Gierlach/Warsaw Chm Chor/Ryszard Zimak
4. Part I: Interlude - Sinf Varsovia/Lord Yehudi Menuhin
5. Part I: For As Long As You Know - Zofia Kilanowicz
6. Part II: What Happened To Six Million Jews - Zofia Kilanowicz/Ryszard Minkiewicz/Robert Gierlach/Warsaw Chm Chor/Ryszard Zimak
7. Part II: We Must Not Forget - Zofia Kilanowicz/Ryszard Minkiewicz/Robert Gierlach
8. Part II: O! If They Are Forgotten - Ryszard Minkiewicz/Zofia Kilanowicz/Robert Gierlach/Warsaw Chm Chor/Ryszard Zimak
9. Part II: May I Become Less Than Nothing - Warsaw Chm Chor/Ryszard Zimak
10. Part II: Epilogue - Zofia Kilanowicz/Ryszard Minkiewicz/Robert Gierlach/Warsaw Chm Chor/Ryszard Zimak

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