Apart
from his opera
Dead Man Walking there is not a
lot of
Jake Heggie in the record catalogue so
this new Naxos release which includes his chamber piece
For
a Look or a Touch is most welcome. The
disc is produced under the auspices of Music of Remembrance,
a Seattle-based organisation which aims to remember Holocaust
musicians and their art. Their programmes include both
music by those persecuted by the Nazis and contemporary
pieces inspired by Holocaust victims and survivors, plus
works reflecting folk and art cultures targeted by the
Nazi regime. Heggie’s piece was commissioned by Music
of Remembrance because artistic director Mina Miller
wanted a piece which reflected the persecution of homosexuals
by the Third Reich.
Heggie
and his librettist Gene Scheer used Robert Epstein and
Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary film
Paragraph 175 as
background for the piece; in the film, surviving homosexuals
tell their stories. From this came the story of Manfred
Lewin and Gad Beck. Lewin, who did not survive the Holocaust,
wrote poetry and a journal for his lover, Beck, who did
survive. These literary survivals became the basis for
Scheer’s libretto.
Heggie
and Scheer have written a small-scale theatre-piece in
which the elderly Gad Beck, a spoken role taken by Julian
Patrick, is visited by the ghost of his lover Manfred
Lewin (baritone, Morgan Smith). The two reminisce and
Lewin provides Beck with a degree of closure. Morgan
Smith sings a series of songs/arias which are linked
with dialogue and spoken solos for Julian Patrick. Strictly
speaking the piece mixes song-cycle and melodrama as
most of Patrick’s utterances are underscored by the instrumental
ensemble. Heggie has written the accompaniment for a
small ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello and
piano and much of the piece is flexibly, lightly and
transparently scored.
Heggie
writes with what I might call tough lyricism. He mixes
styles, bringing in elements of the Jazz Age for the
song about the delights of pre-War Berlin - though Heggie’s
music evokes New York more than Berlin - and is not afraid
of violence. But for much of the time he seems to be
aiming for a moving lyricism, a tenderness which evokes
a response to the subject matter without actually describing
it. There are no big tunes, as such, but the music is
constantly melodic, often lyrical and tonal, but never
easy.
I
wanted to like the piece and appreciate Heggie’s and
Scheer’s sincerity. The subject obviously means a lot
to Heggie; he is quoted on the Music of Remembrance web
site –
“This project had deep resonance for me as
a gay man, somebody who grew up in fear of being mocked,
ridiculed and physically harmed because of my sexual
orientation,” said Heggie.
“The title comes from
a line in the documentary Paragraph
175: ‘You could be arrested for a look
or a touch.’ Under the Nazis, innuendo was enough to
convict a person.”
But
unfortunately sincerity is not quite enough. Partly my
disappointment stems from a dislike of the genre that
Heggie and Scheer have chosen - the mixture of song and
spoken word seems to sit together uneasily. I longed
for Julian Patrick to break into song. It did not help
that I found Patrick’s delivery a little too over-boiled
and the general tenor of the words seemed to be too transatlantic.
Patrick just does not feel or sound like a German. His
responses are too American and his relationship with
Morgan Smith’s Manfred is a little unconvincing.
Smith
contributes a finely sung baritone with a nice feel for
the music’s line and good diction. I wished that this
was a simple song-cycle, as it might have worked better.
The instrumentalists led by Craig Sheppard’s piano are
admirable in their accompaniment.
The
other major work on the disc is
Lorrie Laitman’s
The
Seed of Dreams, a song-cycle based on the poetry
of Abraham Sutzkever. Sutzkever was a Jew living in
Vilnius, Lithuania who wrote poetry. Amid all the chaos,
tragedy and resistance Sutzkever wrote poems of classical
metre in perfect rhyme. Laitman has chosen to set the
poems in translations by C.K. Williams and Leonard Wolf.
I’m
afraid that this is, for me, where the problems start.
I find the poems that Laitman actually sets too wordy,
the poetry does not sit well on my ear and the English
versions are neither in classical metre nor do they rhyme.
Laitman clothes these words in powerful lyric lines,
often bravely leaving the voice relatively unaccompanied.
Erich Parce gives a powerful performance which is brave
enough to almost make us believe the work succeeds in
its aims of being tender, noble and moving. Ultimately
I found the language of the poetry got in the way and
wished that Laitman had chosen to set Sutzkever’s original,
which I presume to have been Yiddish. You can find samples
of Sutzkever’s Yiddish poetry
here.
Between
these two works there is a short piece,
In Memoriam, for
solo cello and string ensemble written by the conductor
Gerald
Schwarz for his son Julian, in memory of the musician
David Tonkonogui (1958-2003). This evokes distant memories
of Strauss in
Metamorphosen mood and is perhaps
the most successful piece on the disc partly because
it aims lower and is content to evoke memories of other
pieces. Julian Schwarz’s solo playing is excellent and
I hope that we hear more of him.
Like
some titles from the Naxos Milken Archive series, I felt
that this disc presented the pieces which fitted best
the theme of the series rather than choosing the composers’ best
works. That said, there is much of interest here and
some fine performances; I just don’t feel that I will
be listening to the disc very often.
Robert Hugill