Holocaust Cantata puts human face on suffering
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter

Lamentation requires a cantorial sound. For the performance Thursday night at First Baptist Church of Donald McCullough’s stirring Holocaust Cantata, Symphony Nova Scotia cellist Shimon Walt fulfilled that soulful requirement in partnership with pianist Diana Torbert, the First Baptist Choir, their director Allen Wayte and four readers.

Last year at the invitation of German and Polish consular officials, McCullough performed the 1998 work with his Master Chorale of Washington, in Krakow’s St. Katharina Church, the memorial site of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, as part of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

Thursday night’s performance was the Atlantic Canadian premiere of The Holocaust Cantata.

The work consists of choral settings of texts written by prisoners in the Nazi camps, collected by Aleksander Kulisiewicz. Soloists included sopranos Courtney Cain and Zoe Leger, alto Elizabeth Ashworth and baritone Alan Manchester.

Between movements Constance R. Glube, cantor Ari Isenberg, Joel Jacobson and Donna Thompson gave readings taken from diaries and other prison camp writings.

For the most part McCullough’s score is subdued. It paints a picture of suffering but does not ignore the efforts of prisoners to find meaning in the horror. There is salvation (Singing Saved My Life) and irony (There is No Life like Life at Auschwitz), but in general, the cantata paints a sombre view.

There is restraint as well, which is more effective than symbolic tearing of hair would be. Tears are not enough for grief as huge as this. There is a matter-of-factness about accounts of a horror like a mass execution and the defiance of a young boy who embraces death by his own decision rather than wait for the Nazi soldiers to kick the stool out from under his feet.

The overall effect, through music which sensitively resonates with Jewish folk music, is to put a human face on suffering. It elicits, as it ought, not so much our pity, though it does that, as our compassion, by using art to put us right there in the camps.

Following the cantata, Walt played Prayer, an intensely felt solo cello piece from Ernest Bloch’s Jewish Life.

( spedersen@herald.ca)

WALT MUSIC
Shimon Walt
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