Annelies: A Choral Setting of The Diary of Anne Frank
Sunday May 31, 2015 4:00pm
Fairmount Temple
23737 Fairmount Boulevard Beachwood, Ohio 44122
The Choral Arts Society of Cleveland 2014-2015 season may well be titled a “Season of Anniversaries.” The Cleveland Heights base community chorus has so far this season performed two concerts celebrating its 40 years of music making. CASC will cap the anniversary year with the Cleveland premiere of British composer James Whitbourn’s Annelies, a choral setting of excerpts from Diary of a Young Girl. This concert will commemorate the death of Anne Frank in a concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen 70 years ago as well as the 70 anniversary of the end of World War II.
Annelies, a Holocaust tribute concert, will take place at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 31, 2015 at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple in Beachwood; it is being presented in collaboration with the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and host Fairmount Temple. The performance is supported in part by the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and by the Cyrus Eaton Foundation.
World-class soprano Arianna Zukerman, daughter of Pinchas Zukerman and Eugenia Zukerman, will sing the soprano solo. Ms. Zukerman sang the world premiere of the work and recorded the Grammy-nominated piece for Naxos.
The libretto for the oratorio highlights excerpts from the diary written by Annelies Marie Frank from 1942 when she and her family went into hiding from the Gestapo until August 1944 when the family was betrayed and taken into custody. In the midst of devastation and hopelessness, Anne communicates insights and an equanimity beyond her years. Her diary dramatizes her loves, her hopes, her longings: “ The sun is shining, the sky is a deep blue, there is a lovely breeze and I’m longing—so longing—for everything” (entry of Saturday, 12 February, 1944). Whitbourn makes these musings and emotions of the teenaged diarist palpable in the haunting and complex music of his 2005 oratorio that conveys a universal message of hope, resilience, and the redemptive power of music.
The concert also honors the six million who died during the Holocaust and the three million Jews and other minorities who survived but were traumatized, many of whose children carry forth the burden of their parents’ trauma. The musical performance will be preceded at 3:00 p.m. by a Holocaust education session led by Cantor Sarah J. Sager. Consideration of the impact on survivors will be reflected in a focus on Betty Gold (1930-2014), one of Cleveland’s most beloved survivors, prominent speaker on behalf of the Maltz Museum, co-author of two books and subject of a documentary film. Audience members will also benefit from program annotation provided by Rabbi Roger Klein, a well-regarded local musicologist. Both this pre-concert talk and the performance itself are free and open to the public.
Regarding the significance of this Cleveland premiere, Choral Arts director Martin Kessler says, “This choral masterpiece needs to be heard in a music capital such as Cleveland. Although it has been performed at least 30 times all over the world, it has never been done in Northeast Ohio. About the Grammy-nominated recording, Choir and Organ Magazine wrote, ‘Whitbourn’s devastatingly beautiful and restrained treatment of the subject makes it all the more poignant’.”
Performing Annelies is a culmination for CASC of forty years of promoting excellence in community music making, the choral masterworks of both known and lesser known composers, the continuing musical and vocal development of its members and enhancing access to choral music for all segments of the community. CASC members, a large number of whom reside in Cleveland Heights, rehearse Sunday evenings at Grace Lutheran Church. Recognized as one of the area’s premier musical forces CASC since 2002 is under the talented and enthusiastic directorship of Heights resident Martin Kessler.
CASC concerts have included folk songs, spirituals, short choral masterpieces, and full -scale works. With the support of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, the chorus has also premiered works by British composers Antony Pitts and William Godfree and American composer Robert Cohen. During this 40th anniversary season Choral Arts in December 2014 sang the seldom performed Ralph Vaughan Williams oratorio Hodie. This past March singers collaborated with the Suburban Symphony Orchestra in a full concert version of Carmen, celebrating 100 years of community music, 60 for SSO and 40 for CASC.
For further details about Annelies and information on Sponsorship Patron levels visit www.choralartscleveland.org.
The above article appeared in the Heights Observer here.