OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 26 February 2009

Jewish Musicians (Photo - Yad Vashem 2009)

ARTHUR KOESTLER called it ‘synchronicity’-the force that he believed lay behind coincidences or the tendency of three No 19 buses to arrive at the same time. Last week The Tailor of Inverness prompted me to write about the power of presenting art in its historical context. This week the Hebrides Ensemble have given me a forceful demonstration of just what that might mean in practice.

The Hebrides are led jointly by a musician and a theatre director, William Conway and Ben Twist, and they’ve developed a justified reputation for imaginative programming and finding unusual access routes for audiences into demanding 20th century and contemporary music.

Their current tour takes as its theme ‘On the Brink’, marking the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. The programme highlights the work of two composers, Gideon Klein and Hans Krasa, who were interned in the ‘showcamp’ of Terezin and subsequently murdered, in Furstengrube and Auschwitz respectively.

The Ensemble chose to present this still largely unfamiliar music alongside projected images of the Jewish ghettoes and the death camps, in a sensitive compilation by John MacGeoch. I found this a troubling conjunction. Would Klein and Krasa have wished to have their music, their creative lives, defined by their terrible deaths? Would they, even, have wished to be remembered as Jewish composers?

Until they were imprisoned by the Nazis it’s much more likely that they would have defined themselves first as Czech, secondly as Moravian or Bohemian, and only thirdly, if at all, as Jewish. Moreover the pieces of theirs included in the programme, and all written in Terezin, are full of energy, vitality, even optimism, as if written directly against their surroundings and the prospect of an awful death. Nor, to my ears at least, do they make any reference to Jewish music or traditions.

What was at best a controversial approach become indefensible with the main work in the programme, Bartok’s Sixth String Quartet. Here the accompanying images were if anything even more appalling and distressing. Yet, written in 1939, Bartok’s quartet does not-could not-refer in any way to the death camps.

Yes, Bartok was a staunch anti-Fascist, but to limit this complex, multi-layered work to being the accompaniment to some of the worst atrocities of the century was to impose a single, brutal meaning and thereby to close down our own personal responses to what is, in the end, ‘abstract’ music.

In fact this particular quartet sat oddly in the programme as a whole. A much better choice might have been Schoenberg’s last quartet which, though written in the 1930s in America, shows the composer rediscovering his roots to express his solidarity with his oppressed fellow Jews in Europe.

Just to hammer the point home, the programme began with a moving arrangement for solo violin of Ravel’s version of the Hebrew prayer Kaddish, and the audience was asked not to applaud until the very end of the programme. This imposed solemnity actually worked against the impact of those pieces by Klein and Krasa which ended with an up-beat flourish, almost demanding a burst of applause.

The playing of the Ensemble throughout was beautiful, intense, dramatic, and involving. Klein’s String Trio, in particular, proved to be a major discovery that should be part of the standard repertoire. My only reservation about the musical side was that the Bartok was slightly soft-grained and lacking in urgency, but perhaps that was the players’ unconscious response to the rather reverential air that pervaded the programme.

An intriguing experiment, then, but ultimately, for me, an inappropriate one.

© Robert Livingston, 2009

Links

• Hebrides Ensemble