Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia
Oct. 14, First Unitarian Universalist Church
The artistically venturesome and behaviorally libertine culture of Weimar Germany lasted barely 10 years before it was suppressed by the Nazis, but has had a long afterlife. Its music spread well beyond its home turf of Berlin cabarets and theaters in the 1920s and early ’30s, initially thanks to exiles such as composer Kurt Weill and his spouse, singer Lotte Lenya, and later revivalists such as singers Ute Lemper and Max Raabe; and its rise and fall is frequently evoked by artists who fear crackdowns on free expression.
The Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia’s latest offering, “Swept Away,” recalled the Weimar era’s musical heyday in songs and chamber works by Hanns Eisler, Friedrich Hollander, Franz Schreker and Arnold Schoenberg, and its tragic aftermath in “For a Look or a Touch” by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer.
Heggie’s chamber opera for actor, baritone and small instrumental ensemble, premiered in 2007, staged by the Chamber Music Society in 2016, now reprised for its 20th anniversary season, imagines the encounter between an elderly Holocaust survivor and the ghost of his lover, one of many homosexuals who died in the Nazi death camps. Scheer’s text and narrative drew inspiration from the journal of Manfred Lewin, a gay Jewish man who was murdered with the rest of his family at Auschwitz, and the testimonies of several survivors in “Paragraph 175,” a documentary by Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.
In this performance, actor Doug Schneider and baritone Paul Max Tipton were side by side, the actor seated, the singer standing; but their characters’ distance, both in time and in the survivor’s resistance to remembering their love affair and its tragic ending, was made clear by lack of physical interaction. Schneider spoke rather softly in a pained, world-weary manner; Tipton sang with a combination of dreaminess and passion.
The accompanying band – flutist Mary Boodell, clarinetist Ian Tyson, violinist Grant Houston, cellist James Wilson and pianist Carsten Schmidt – was audibly tuned to Heggie’s stylistic wavelength, a hybrid of Weimar-adjacent modernism and operatic lyricism.
Imbalances between voices and instruments were at times precarious in “For a Look or a Touch,” but less troublesome than they had been in the first half of the program, when glaring piano tone obscured the voices of Tipton and soprano Sheila Dietrich in four songs by Eisler and Hollander. Dietrich projected best, in Hollander’s cabaret standard “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fluss auf Lieben Eingestellt” (“From Head to Toe I Am Prepared for Love”), better-known in English as “Falling in Love Again (I Can’t Help It).”
The volume of the instrumental ensemble made Dietrich’s delivery of six numbers from Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” barely comprehensible. (Its German Sprechstimme, or speech-song, is tough to follow in the best of aural circumstances.) Actress-dancer Gwen Grastorf, in commedia dell’arte costume, physically complemented the words that listeners struggled to hear.
“Pierrot Lunaire,” introduced in 1912, and Schreker’s miniature tone poem “Wind,” dating from 1908-09, were pre-echoes in style and spirit to the sounds of the post-World War I Weimar musical culture – and a template for Heggie’s score, for a “Pierrot” ensemble of strings, winds and piano. Shrecker slightly altered the instrumentation, subtracting flute and adding French horn, played here by Devin Gossett.
The ensemble emphasized the angular impressionism of the Schoenberg, and realized the stylistic interplay of romanticism and modernism in Shrecker’s score.