Identity
Identity
Our spotlight on identity features three works by important Black American composers. Rhiannon Gidden’s At the Purchaser’s Option is a searing depiction of the slave trade. Carlos Simon’s Remember Me is drawn from his larger Requiem for the Enslaved evoking the spirit of those in captivity. Jessie Montgomery’s Source Code, building on motifs from Black spirituals, takes on an added dimension with choreography we’ve commissioned from Spectrum Dance Theater’s Donald Byrd.
The program also explores Jewish identity and its expression across time and place. The world premiere of a new work by Portuguese composer Luis Tinoco tells of the so-called “crypto-Jews” and their search for ways of practicing their faith while concealing their identity. We hear echoes of this legacy in the atmospheric Three Ancient Airs by Alberto Hemsi, a 20th-century composer who was born in Turkey into the diaspora of Sephardic Jews from Spain.
Michel Michelet, remembered by many as a prolific movie composer, was born Mikhail Isaakovich Levin in Kiev. He became Michel Lévine after moving to Paris. Fleeing Nazi-occupied France, he came to Hollywood and worked as Michelet. The original published score of the 1923 Elegie we perform was printed in Yiddish, Russian and German, and refers to the composer as Michael Lewin. The soulful work evokes a traditional Hebrew prayer derived from the Jewish Sabbath morning liturgy.
Viktor Ullmann’s Brezulinka is a set of three Yiddish songs that the composer wrote as a prisoner in Terezín before he was sent to his death in Auschwitz. Although of Jewish parentage, Ullmann was raised a Catholic, converted to Protestantism and later returned to Catholicism. Still, he was classified Jewish under Nazi racial laws. It’s a tragic irony that Ullmann – raised Christian – rediscovered his Jewish roots in a concentration camp.
This concert comes at the time of a Russian invasion claiming to deny the existence of a distinct Ukrainian identity rooted in traditions, language and belief that go back as far as the 9th-century. Composer Myroslav Skoryk has been described as a spiritual embodiment of Ukraine’s cultural identity, and his music takes on special significance today in response to the Russian assault. His Carpathian Rhapsody, evoking distinctive Ukrainian folk elements, reminds us of the need to defend an identity under existential threat.
