Sparks of Glory: In Sleep The World Is Yours
Free
Lori Laitman — In Sleep the World Is Yours
Erwin Schulhoff — String Quartet No. 2
Program
Erwin Schulhoff – String Quartet No. 2 (1925)
Mikhail Shmidt and Leonid Keylin, violins; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Mara Finkelstein, cello
Laszlo Weiner – Duo for Violin and Viola (1939)
Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola
Lori Laitman – In Sleep the World Is Yours (2014)
Poetry by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger
(b. Czernowitz, Romania, 1924 - d. Michailowka labor camp, Ukraine, 1942)
Commissioned by Music of Remembrance
Made possible by Music of Remembrance's Commissioning Circle
Megan Chenovick, soprano; Ben Hausmann, oboe; Mina Miller, piano
Details
2014 marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, a conflict that ended the world as many knew it and ushered in a frenzied creative turmoil in all of the arts. SAM’s collection includes pioneering works that reflect the radical artistic innovation that emerged in WWI’s wake. In this concert-with-commentary, MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller draws on these art works to illustrate how the period’s new musical directions responded to the same upheaval. Composer Erwin Schulhoff was profoundly disillusioned by the war, and his early musical style was influenced by the Dadaist movement. The iconoclastic Schulhoff was silenced in a Nazi labor camp, but his Second String Quartet (1925) exemplifies the audacity that made him an important musical figure between the two world wars. The Hungarian composer László Weiner died at 28 in a Nazi labor camp, but his beautiful Duo for violin and viola (1939) is a haunting reminder of a potential the world will never know. Soprano Megan Chenovick sings American composer Lori Laitman’s In Sleep The World Is Yours. This 2013 song cycle, commissioned by MOR, sets the poignant poetry of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a promising young talent who died in a Nazi slave labor camp at the age of eighteen. We’ll never know what music these artists might have created in a longer life and in a normal world, but their moral courage can inspire us all, and challenge us to understand the extraordinary depth of human capacity. All works performed by some of Seattle’s stellar instrumentalists, many drawn from the Seattle Symphony.