Honoring Babi Yar

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Remember Shostakovich? He was all the rage last spring but seemed to drop off of the planet over the summer months, pushed to the side by that pesky Mozart. But now Shostakovich — and his 100th birthday anniversary — is back with a vengeance. I’m guessing, however, that none of this fall’s events at the more famous venues will be as emotional as the presentation of his commemoration of the massacre at Babi Yar held Wednesday evening at Safra Hall, within the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

On Yom Kippur, the 29th and 30th of September, 1941, the Einsatzgruppe (mobile extermination squad) of the German army began the killing, mostly by machine gun, of over 33,000 Jews and Gypsies in two days at a ravine just northwest of the City of Kiev. Over the next few months, the total number of murder victims reached well over 100,000. The event was memorably captured in art by the poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko and by Shostakovich with Symphony No. 13. For the world premiere of a portion of the two piano version of the symphony, the museum age selected someone to read the poem. That someone turned out to be Yevtushenko himself.

A number of holocaust survivors were in attendance and several of them wore stars of David, not pendants around their necks but rather big, bold, bright yellow emblems cut from construction paper, badges of honor and reminders of those horrible times. After receiving the Raoul Wallenberg award for his courageous humanitarian efforts, Mr. Yevtushenko read, in both Russian and English, the poem that brought him such enduring fame.

The second atrocity at Babi Yar was that it was never commemorated by the Soviets. Because of the willing nature of the assistance of the local Ukranian population, the USSR preferred to sweep the incident under the rug of history. When Yevtushenko published the poem in 1961 and Shostakovich followed with his musical setting one year later, both were living on the edge. In fact, this two piano version was fashioned by the composer because he had to have the new symphony mounted before the Union of Composers in order to receive permission to allow it to see the light of public performance.

The mood at this event, however, was not always solemn. Mr. Yetushenko read a comic poem about being every one of the creatures of the earth and a recent effort in New Orleans that started out grim but soon turned sunny and ultimately optimistic. The musical selections were also varied.

I was unfamiliar with the first piece on the program, but no matter, as the Concertino for Two Pianos is essentially a recycling of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Symphonies Nos.1 and 8. The duo pianists Misha and Cipa Dichter played it with a great deal of percussive fervor, reminding me of those homemade recordings by the Bartoks — Bela and Ditta — from the 1940s.

Bulgarian Valentin Peytchinov was quite impressive in the Shostakovich song “A Fragment,” accompanied by Mr. Dichter. Here is the modal setting of a simple story wherein an old Jewish man must answer the knock of Death at his door. Although the basso was a little stiff in his interpretive manner, he was perfectly on pitch in this exotic melodic progression.

Patrick Gardner conducted the soloist and the two pianists along with the men of three different choral groups — the Riverside Choral Society and the Rutgers Glee Club and Kirkpatrick Choir — in the Babi Yar premiere. It was fascinating to hear the contrast between Mr. Yevtushenko’s breathless staccato reading, delivered with the acumen of a great actor, and the more sober grandeur of the Shostakovich adaptation. The poet was by this time seated in the audience and I wondered what he thought of such a divergent rendition of his original text.

The performance itself was first rate. The Dichters traversed these orchestral textures with infectious élan and seeming ease. The soloist was magisterial — although being on the same program as the eloquent poet worked to his disadvantage — and the assembled throng of singers was ghostly accurate in its subterranean explorations. Needless to say, in a crowd such as this one on the 65th anniversary of the massacre, emotions ran high. But, attempting to retain my critical objectivity, I can conclude the musical value of the evening was significant.

For me, the most affecting line of the original poem is “When, for all time, is buried and forgotten the last of the antisemites on this earth.”

Alas, we are not there yet.


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