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9.13.2001 00:05
Songs by composers the Nazis silenced
The Nazis embraced composers as long as they toed the party line. Those who didn't uphold the ideal of an Aryan paradise, members of the avant-garde and composers with a fondness for jazz, were banned.
If you were a Jew, your fate was far worse. An important chapter in European music was blotted out because a host of important composers were murdered in Nazi death camps.
In recent years, though, bits and pieces of this music have begun to surface. The Boston-based Hawthorne String Quartet and the Boston Symphony have performed scores written inside the walls of Terezin, a Czech concentration camp.
The Nazis wanted the outside world to believe that Terezin was a haven for Jewish artists, writers and composers, a place where they were free to ply their art. Musicians were even allowed to produce an opera. But in reality, Terezin was a way station for Auschwitz.
Sunday, soprano Mara Sindoni makes her local debut with an afternoon of songs by composers the Nazis silenced, pieces that are rarely done and in some cases are all but unknown. The unusual program is free and takes place at 3 p.m. at the Laurelmead retirement home, 355 Blackstone Blvd. in Providence.
Czech an awkward language to sing
Highlights of the program include a lost song cycle by Ervin Schulhoff, who died in a Bavarian death camp, and Ernst Krenek's out-of-print
Kafka Lieder,
which Sindoni discovered in the Boston Public Library.
Krenek, a foward-looking composer who wrote an opera about a black jazz musician who takes over the world, was among those composers who were banned, the so-called Entartete or "decadent" composers. So was Kurt Weill, famed composer of
A Three Penny Opera.
Sindoni, who moved from Brookline, Mass., to Pawtucket about two years ago because she could no longer afford Boston-area rents, presented this program once before, in Boston.
After she arrived in Rhode Island, she approached the Rhode Island Holocaust Museum about presenting it here. The museum contacted Laurelmead, which hosts occasional concerts.
The program is difficult, Sindoni said, because so much of the music is written in Czech, an awkward language to sing.
Those who attend Sunday's concert may be surprised to find the music not filled overt horror and angst. References of that sort had to be masked to avoid Nazi censors.
In a lullaby written by Gideon Klein, an exceptionally talented composer put to death in his mid-20s, Sindoni said, "you always wonder if the child is sleeping forever."
Not just a curiosity
Sindoni has been interested in out-of-the-way music for much of her career. She was among the first to record the songs of Alma Mahler, wife of composer Gustav Mahler, and she's put together a program of 21 women composers whose music she unearthed at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester.
"I like digging around in libraries," said Sindoni, who does some teaching at the Center for Arts and Spirituality in Woonsocket.
As for her interest in composers persecuted at the hands of the Nazis, Sindoni said that many of her friends and teachers in the Brookline area were Jews, and that she found herself "touched by the whole situation."
But she also considers this important music, not a curiosity to be performed every once in a while. In some ways, she said, it forms a lost bridge from Mahler and the hard-to-penetrate 12-tone compositional style of Arnold Schoenberg.
"It's not a novelty," she said. "I feel this music is alive."
Mara Sindoni will be accompanied during the concert by pianist Akemi Fujita. A reception will follow. For more information, call 453-7860.
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