MUSIC REVIEWS : VOCAL REMEMBRANCE OF HOLOCAUST

How fitting that all the music for a Yom Hashoah concert, honoring the day of remembrance of the Holocaust, be vocal. Neal Brostoff, who organized Sunday’s event at Gindi Auditorium, and the contributing composers must have understood that giving voice where silence was once commanded is the most apt form of expression.

It also turned out to be the most natural impulse, considering that the texts used for two groups of songs were written by prisoners of the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos and children of the Terezin concentration camp.

Very little is more poignant than the poetic murmurings of genocide victims, especially the young, innocent ones who speak so eloquently--as did Anne Frank--of the simple yearnings for life. Not surprisingly, the power of these verbal images exceeded the musical means of their settings.

Only one song, for instance, from Srul Irving Glick’s “i never saw another butterfly,” matched its text in ironic fervor--although mezzo-soprano Rickie Weiner-Gole, aptly accompanied by Brostoff, gave rich utterance to all six in the group. And Stephen Jaffe’s Three Yiddish Songs, which Aviva Rosenbloom dispatched with occasionally cloudy tone, had a mournful austerity that almost belied the lyric innocence of the poems.

But neither here, with a chamber complement, nor in the Glick nor in the “Juedische Chronik,” was there any reliance on Hebraic motifs. The latter work, a group-composed message cantata, was sung most affectingly by Anne Marie Ketchum along with Peter Van Derick, the Kol Echad Chorale and 27 members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Alan Weiner conducting. Variously set by Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze and others to Jens Gerlach’s brutally graphic text, it also boasted the kind of contemporary sound that eschews wallowing in identifiable associations.