The famously accomplished San Francisco Girls Chorus of singers between ages 5 and 18 is presenting a concert called Children’s Crusade, advertised as "Serious Music for Serious Times" — a richly deserved title and description for a program dealing with war and death.
Artistic Director Lisa Bielawa — avant-garde composer and SFGC alumna — put together this unusual, ambitious program for the April 17 and 19 concerts, in Berkeley and San Francisco, respectively.
German-Kurdish composer Ralf Yusuf Gawlick’s Kinderkreuzzug (Children’s Crusade) is based on Bertolt Brecht’s story of 50 Polish war orphans who band together in World War II to search for a land of peace. The dramatic cantata is written for children's voices and small chamber ensemble including clarinet, string trio, church hand bells, and organ. Valérie Sainte-Agathe conducts.
During her teens, singing with the chorus, Bielawa was deeply impressed by works written by children in the Terezin concentration camp:
When I felt the impact of our singing on these audiences, in the context of this emotionally demanding yet beautifully human and expressive musical work, I came to a new understanding of what a musical performance could be, how important our role as choral singers could be, in the face of some of our society's most troubling sorrows.
I knew when I discovered Gawlick's Kinderkreuzzug that this work could give our singers an opportunity to fill this role for today's audiences, and deepen our whole community's shared understanding of our human history and of its dark shadows in our own time.
The composer, now teaching at Boston College, told SFCV:
Brecht provides striking, scattered images that are both profoundly moving as well as alarming. My music seeks to capture and illustrate this protest and refugee movement against violence and war through the dramatic discourse of a cantata for children’s choir and chamber ensemble.
Kinderkreuzzug received its world première in Boston in 2010, followed by performances in Germany and Poland. Each performance, including the upcoming West Coast premieres, is a further step on this crusade. Tragically, the story of suffering, depravation, innocence lost, and death is relived in our own time by children throughout the world, particularly in Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan and Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan … to our own southern border.
The concerts also include the world premiere of a new arrangement by Philip Glass and Bielawa of Glass’ Father Death Blues, a setting of Allen Ginsberg’s poem, and Lili Boulanger’s brief Pie Jesu from 1918. The music for Ginsberg's meditation on death is "in an arrangement made expressly for our young singers, for this performance, by Philip and myself," says Bielawa.
Marie-Juliette Olga Lili Boulanger, younger sister of the composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger (who died at age 92 in 1979), composed Pie Jesu on her deathbed, at age 24, at the end of World War I, which she spent as a nurse, attending wounded soldiers on the field.