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Jewish Music & Poetry Project Premieres

Jason Victor Serinus on April 6, 2013
Nanette McGuinness
Nanette McGuinness

Associated from their inception in with the music of San Francisco-based composer David Garner, the six-year-old Jewish Music & Poetry Project — soprano Nanette McGuinness and pianist Dale Tsang-Hall — performed an evening of music to Jewish women’s poetry or by Jewish composers on Friday night. Chief among their offerings to a small but dedicated audience in Old First Church were the world premiere of Garner’s song cycle Phönix (Phoenix), the West Coast premiere of Edwin Geist’s Drei Litauische Lieder (Three Lithuanian Songs), and Garmer’s eight-song Chanson für Morgen and Three Etudes for solo piano.

Whether McGuinness was under the weather was never announced, but several of her actions suggested such. Not only did she insist on performing with piano lid opened only as far as a prayer book could fit, despite the damping effect it had on the Steinway’s highs, but she also coughed several times after her three water breaks in the concert’s second half.

Perhaps this accounts for the pronounced undertones in her ever-present vibrato, which lent a degree of monotonous sameness to her lyric soprano. There were, to be sure, several lovely floated high notes, the most secure of which came in the opening selection, Zemlinsky’s fittingly sweet and romantic “Süsse, süsse Sommernacht” (Sweet, sweet summer night). But for the most part, even when songs expressed suffering and anguish in forte, the persistent vibrato and undertones vitiated emotional impact.  

Thus did Garner’s Chanson für Morgen, the last cycle on the program, grow tedious. Settings of eight poems by Mascha Kaléko (1907-1975), for whom the Jewish Music & Poetry Project was initially named, the songs’ suffering and death obsession reflect Kaléko’s fate as a Polish-born German exile who escaped to the United States shortly before World War II, not long after her publications of verses were banned by the Nazis.

Dale Tsang-Hall
Dale Tsang-Hall

The cycle captures the troubling emptiness of Kaléko’s verse. In the fifth song, “Inventar” (Inventory), Garner has his soprano read the numbers 1-4 in German (ein, zwei, drei, vier) as she sings short verses such as (in translation) “House without roof / Child without bed / Plate without bread / Star without light.” These McGuinness sang without feeling, as if depleted, while Tsang-Hall’s piano repeated the same figure over and over as if nothing could possibly change. The subsequent “Gebet” (Prayer) ended without fanfare, as if the request to “leave us in solitude, but not forsaken” had fallen on deaf ears. Only in the last line of the ironic concluding waltz, “Allerseelen” (All Soul’s Day), did Garner resolve his harmonic bleakness with a romantic line that drove home the despair of the question, “Do the dead really feel nothing in the grave?”

Phönix (2012) sets four poems by Rose Ausländer (1901-1988). The native of an area that is now, more or less, the Ukranian / Romanian border, Ausländer miraculously survived two years in the Czernowitz ghetto and a third in hiding. Escaping death, she moved to the U.S., and finally back to Germany, where she spent her final decade in another form of captivity, dictating her poems while bedridden with arthritis.

As one might expect, Phönix’s subject matter and Garner’s music dwell on suffering. Melodic repetition in the first two songs confirmed that ultimate escape is illusory, while the empty music in the final song aptly expressed that the war would be over “at the end of time.”

The West Coast premiere of Edwin Geist’s Drei Litauische Lieder (Three Lithuanian Songs) served to commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust “whose lives and creativity were truncated …” The songs, completed two years before Geist was shot by the Nazis in 1942, are filled with both horror and promise. Tsang-Hall churned away wonderfully, especially in the final song, but McGuinness’ limitations curtailed emotional impact.

Piano Solos

In strong contrast, Garner’s Three Etudes overflowed with positive, seemingly limitless energy. Playing with the piano lid opened to full width, Tsang-Hall flawlessly delivered the catchy, syncopated rhythms of Labyrinth (1991), the darting little figures and wonderful bursts of high treble light in Traveling Light (1991), and the surfeit of energy in the delicious Dodecahedron (1993, 2012).

Earlier in the program, before someone emerged to open the piano lid, Tsang-Hall performed Osvaldo Golijov’s lovely and romantic Zz’s Dream (2008) and Vitezslava Kaprálová’s spicier Grotesque Passsacaglia (1936). The latter cried for the full tones and force of the Steinway. Also on the program were Gabriela Lena Frank’s lovely Barcarola latinoamericana (2007), whose repeated notes, redolent of the mandolin, Tsang-Hall captured beautifully. The pungent chromaticism of Laura Schwendinger’s Pedal Point (1996) and engaging forward momentum of Elena Ruehr’s Prelude III (2002) flowed easily through her hands.