Katharine Gowers (violin)
Antje Weithaas (violin)
Tatja Masurenko (viola)
Natalie Clein (cello)
Charles Owen (piano)
Pascal Theatre Company: Daniel Ben-Zenou, Amanda Boxer, Louisa Clein,
Ruth Posner, Thomas Kampe, Ian Watts
Music and words are unequal partners, each with respective
strengths. Words can be more direct than music can ever be; music can
be intense in a way that words will never know. Put them side by side
and the inequalities show.
Two days after the official ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’,
the cellist Natalie Clein and her cousin, the playwright Julia
Pascal, joined forces to mark the occasion: music by composers who
were exiled, or killed, by the Nazis, interspersed with readings from
Pascal’s Holocaust-inspired dramas. The evening opened with the Five
Pieces for string quartet (1923) by Ervin Schulhoff, born in Prague
in 1894 and dead – of tuberculosis – in 1942 in Wülzburg (not Wurzburg,
as the programme note had it). The dance-inspired music is much more
adventurous than the bland title suggests: fizzing with rhythmic excitement
and resourceful use of the quartet, its dry spiky humour can swiftly
evaporate to suggest some dark, existentialist despair lurking behind
the surface jollity; the lyricism is soon poisoned. The concert ended
with Schulhoff’s First Quartet, another dance-based work – and, again,
much deeper than its surfaces were prepared to admit. Its melodic lines
move disconcertingly swiftly from a terse elegance to brioso,
almost skinhead enthusiasm. But in the exquisite closing bars Schulhoff
drops his macho guard: a rocking figure in the viola triggers a responding
tag in the cello, while the violins sing in plangent chords above. It
is very beautiful.
Sandwiched between the Schulhoffs were three further
items: the brief, Bergian Adagio from the Piano Sonata by Gideon
Klein (1919–44), perhaps the most gifted of all the composers incarcerated
in Terezín, the gruff, vigorous Dance for string trio,
written in Terezín by Hans Krása (1899–1944), and the
elliptical Retrospectum, again for string trio, by Berthold Goldschmidt
(1903–96), an attempt ‘to express in chamber music the ups and downs
of my parents’ life in the first 30 years of the century’ – written
from a vantage point near its end, 1991. Goldschmidt’s bitter-sweet
musical language perches precariously over a shifting landscape of emotional
ambiguity, his highly contrapuntal textures providing an intellectual
underpinning for an otherwise disturbing succession of aperçus.
Its shifting focus makes it a difficult piece to bring off, but the
four ladies in this impromptu quartet brought it to passionate life.
They play, indeed, as if they have been playing together for years,
in a blend of complete technical competence and emotional sensitivity
– they revealed depths of feeling in the Schulhoff, too, that I had
not previously noticed. It was both thrilling and moving. Poor Charles
Owen hardly had a chance to shine, though the Klein indicated considerable
musicianship: the only other piece that featured him, Bloch’s Jewish
Song for cello and piano, was pulled from the programme to bring
down its length.
And that length can be put down to rather too generous
a helping of extracts from Julia Pascal’s plays. Each was absorbing
– a Jew trapped in 1940 Vienna, writing a last letter to his mother
to record the degradations visited on his people by the Nazis; a Jewish
music teacher, pre-War, shrugging off the Nazi threat, as so many did
– fatally; an outline of collaboration on occupied Guernsey, drawn from
contemporary documents. Less would have been more, but the drama did
provide the human immediacy the music could not – music doesn’t express
itself in terms of cruelty and treachery and fear – and it brought home
the brutality more effectively than many a TV documentary: the actors
in Julia Pascal’s school, reading from published scripts, commanded
complete silence from the near-capacity Purcell Room audience. But somehow
the mix didn’t work: the horrors brought to life by the acting suggested
that the music was something of a luxury, and the music indeed removed
us from the barbarity the words evoked. Yet that, of course, was daily
life for millions under Hitler, Stalin and countless minor despots,
and even more pointedly so for composers like Hans Krása and
Gideon Klein in Terezín, continuing to create while death stalked
past their windows. Perhaps the very dislocation of this concert can
teach us something.
Martin Anderson
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