After two exhausting days in Whitewater for the NATS competition (I was up at 4:45 a.m. Friday morning, and 5:00 a.m. Saturday morning) I was mightily tempted to spend Saturday evening camped out on the sofa…. or better yet, in bed. But that would have meant missing the American premiere of “The Cry: A Requiem for the Lost Child” – and missing that would have meant disregarding the fervent recommendations of several people who had heard the work and said it was extraordinary. And actually, I was already excited about this event after having interviewed Adrian Snell, its composer, on Wednesday’s morning show and hearing several excerpts from the work. So one way or another, Kathy and I shook off our exhaustion and went . . . and we are SO glad we did. Missing this would have been a crime.
A brief word of background. Adrian Snell is a British composer who swings easily and naturally between the “classical” and “popular” musical worlds, and has done so quite successfully for the last several decades. This particular work, “The Cry,” was composed about ten years ago when Snell visited the children’s memorial at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum. The piece combines the standard Latin texts of the requiem mass with more modern poems, many written by or inspired by the words of children caught in the horrors of the Holocaust or in more modern conflicts that have endangered children. The work swings between a number of musical styles, but still manages to achieve a powerful cohesiveness as it takes us on a moving journey from Despair to Hope. And its central message is that we should never forget that children are so often the most vulnerable victims of hatred and war.
Although I loved the way that Snell set the traditional Latin texts as well as the words of such writers as Elie Wiesel, I found myself most moved by the words of children like an 11-year-old from Yugoslavia, who said: “I swear to you, I do not kick the football like before. I do not sing the way I did. I have locked up my bicycle, and I have locked up my smile. I have locked up my games and my childish jokes as well. Will the waiting be long? I do not want to grow old while still just a child. . . “ As I heard those words, I was reminded of an incredible book called Salvaged Pages, which presented fifteen young person’s diaries from the Holocaust. It’s hard to imagine anything more heartbreakingly poignant than to read the words of young people writing about their world turning darker and darker by forces they do not begin to understand – in most cases not having any idea of the kind of hell that is about to consume them and almost everyone and everything that they hold dear. If you want to see the Holocaust through the eyes of children, you need to read Salvaged Pages, edited by Alexandra Zapruder. You will never forget it. (I did when it was first published, and then was privileged to interview Ms. Zapruder about it for the morning show. And in all of my years with the program, that remains the single interview I prize above all others.)
Back to “The Cry.” This work combines choir with chamber orchestra, multiple keyboards, and multiple percussion – plus two soloists and a number of narrators – some of whom were children. That’s a lot of artistic balls to keep up in the air, and conductor James Schatzman did an admirable job of keeping everything together. We didn’t know until after the performance that the dress rehearsal the night before had been a rather nightmarish affair. There was an organ recital on Carthage that evening, and only after that could the platforms and chairs be set up, as well as all of the microphones. . . so the rehearsal itself did not begin until 9:50, and most of the musicians were still there at 11:30. It requires an extraordinary sense of commitment to carry on under such trying circumstances- and then to bring off the kind of fine performance we heard last night. And that’s what the Choral Arts Society, Prairie High School Choir, soloists and instrumentalists managed to do. Those of us who were there would never had guessed that anything had ever been amiss.
There were some standout performances that merit special praise, including that of violinist Rebecca Engstrom, who actually played in this work’s world premiere about a decade ago. (On Wednesday’s morning show, she and her husband told the story of how a chance encounter they had with the composer in Jerusalem led to her involvement in the composition he was just beginning to write.) Her beautiful, heartfelt playing was one of the loveliest things about the whole night. Her daughter Talia (one of my sister- in-law Polly’s finest singers at Tremper) sang her solos with aching, gentle beauty. The other main soloist, Leif Olsen, did a truly admirable job with the taxing part of the Spiritual Searcher. The instrumentalists – especially the very busy three keyboardists – handled this widely varied score wonderfully. The choirs sang their music skillfully and with tremendous heart. And the performance would have been sadly incomplete without the young people who did some of the poetry readings, and did them so beautifully.
The only significant regret I had about the whole night was that at the end, composer Adrian Snell was not brought out for the audience to acknowledge and thank. I don’t know if it was an oversight of the moment- or if he had expressed some wish to not be so acknowledged- but either way, I think all of us in the audience felt a serious frustration about that. We felt like we had been given a very special gift, and as much as we wanted to thank the musicians – and did – we also wanted and needed to thank the brilliant genius without whom none of this would have been possible. It helped to have a moment afterwards to thank and congratulate him personally, but I know the audience as a whole would have appreciated the chance to say thank you . . . not just for this evening, but for this astonishing composition and its capacity to help all of us remember the children who otherwise might be forgotten.
pictured above: Josh Bote, one of the young readers. The words he read were written by a ten-year-old boy from Yugoslavia: “If I were president, the tanks would be playhouses for the kids – boxes of candy would fall from the sky – the mortars would fire balloons – and the guns would blossom with flowers. All the world’s children would sleep in a peace unbroken by alerts or by shooting. The refugees would return to their villages. And we would start anew.”