Hope, Remembrance in ‘Sounds of Healing’

There was a lot of history hovering over the Royce Hall stage Monday evening, and much hope as well. An international consortium of musical forces and the confluence of the 950th anniversary of the city of Nuremberg, the 62nd anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht terror and the 10th anniversary of the death of Leonard Bernstein have produced “Sounds of Healing,” commemorative performances of Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony here and in Nuremberg later this month.

In Bernstein’s “Kaddish,” project music director Nick Strimple has a powerful but hardly unproblematic vehicle for reconciliation. The multifarious performance challenges were generally well met here. For the adult choir he had the massed voices of the Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale, the Choral Society of Southern California and the Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church Chancel Choir. For the crucial children’s chorus he had the impressively accomplished El Camino Real High School Camerata, and the orchestra was the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra.

American soprano Lynda Keith McKnight sang the second movement prayer with clear, serene tone and wide vibrato. Czech actress Edita Brychta made a very compelling Speaker through the first two movements and did what she could with the third, where Bernstein’s personal theology lapses into greeting-card sentiment on its way to a feel-good end.

Strimple guided the dramatic performance with care and conviction. He takes the vocalists on to Nuremberg, where they will join choirs from Canada and Israel, and the Nuremberg Symphony, in two performances.

The concert began--after five speakers--with two Czech works dealing with the Holocaust. The vibrant, death-defying Study for String Orchestra by Pavel Haas was written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, and the composer was killed the following year at Auschwitz. The YMF strings grappled with it bravely, albeit imprecisely in the first violins.

Then came the U.S. premiere of “Lost Paradise,” the second song from “An Umbrella From Piccadilly,” Jan Hanus’ 1978 orchestral song cycle on poetry by Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert. This is a noisy and turbulent work, not nearly as haunted and sophisticated as the poem translated in the program booklet. It does, however, provide a bravura 10-minute workout for a fearless bass, here the plangent and passionate Ira S. Bigeleisen, cantor at Adat Ari El in North Hollywood.