San Francisco Debut: After Life

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May 18, 2015 - 12:00 pm

Music of Remembrance: "After Life" & "Farewell, Auschwitz"

Vibrant program featured California premiere of Heggie’s Farewell, Auschwitz, in addition to Holocaust- era works by Dauber and Beigelman

Music of Remembrance (MOR) made its San Francisco debut with After Life, a bold new MOR-commissioned opera by Tom Cipullo, on Monday, May 18, 2015 at Temple Emanu-El’s Music at Meyer concert series. With a libretto by Colorado Poet Laureate David Mason, Cipullo’s daring musical drama reunites Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein, who posthumously meet again to argue about art and life in an impassioned debate over the artist’s responsibilities in times of war. The provocative new work boasted an all-star cast. Brilliant mezzo-soprano Catherine Cook (San Francisco Opera) soars in the role of Stein. Baritone Robert Orth, who has been hailed by Opera News as “fixture of contemporary opera," shines as Picasso. They were joined by soprano Ava Pine (Fort Worth Opera), heralded by Fort Worth Weekly as “a vision of energy, enthusiasm and skill,” and accompanied by MOR’s stellar instrumental ensemble drawn primarily from the ranks of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. The same vocal trio was featured in the California premiere ofJake Heggie’s Farewell, Auschwitz, an inspiring tribute to the incredible true story of Krystyna Zywulska. Zywulska escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and joined the Polish resistance, only to be captured and sent as a political prisoner to Auschwitz, where she created poems that circulated secretly among her fellow inmates and became anthems of resistance. In Farewell, Auschwitz, commissioned by MOR in 2013, Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer have adapted five of Zywulska’s actual verses, capturing their rich juxtaposition of compassion, mockery and defiance. Audiences were treated to a performance of the beguiling Serenata for Violin & Piano (1942) that the young Robert Dauber composed while imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp, and David Beigelman’s mesmerizing Dybbuk Dances (1941), originally performed in the Lodz ghetto where Beigelman was forced by the Nazis. This concert represents MOR’s debut San Francisco performance.