Premiere Performance, Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival, David Krakauer, clarinet, Gil Rose, conductor. January 11, 2018, Carnegie Music Hall, Pittsburgh.
Program Note by Dan Lippel (New Focus Recordings)
Lament/Witches’ Sabbath, written for the extraordinary clarinet soloist David Krakauer and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, is Mathew Rosenblum’s most personal piece to date. When he was a child, his grandmother told him the story of how she fled the well-documented 1919 massacre in Proskurov, Ukraine, with six children and pregnant with his mother, whom she gave birth to in the woods while fleeing the massacre. Lament/Witches’ Sabbath involves the recounting of his family history by incorporating Ukrainian and Jewish lament field recordings, his grandmother’s recorded voice, klezmer-tinged clarinet with orchestra, and elements from the last movement of Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique, "Witches’ Sabbath.” The heart-rending cadences of the Ukrainian laments communicate a communal pain felt through the generations and contrast the elements of fear and superstition represented in the Berlioz. Rosenblum's use of microtonality echoes the expressive pitch world of lament singing, eschewing equal temperament in favor of the sound of unfiltered human emotion. The piece is unsettlingly timely -- tackling topics such as migration, loss, memory, and cultural transformation. The piece is also a reconnection between Rosenblum and Krakauer who were high school friends growing up in New York City. In placing the laments at the center of an expansive work of new art music, Rosenblum presents this piece both as a cathartic reconciliation with his family's own personal history and a more universal cry of agony for communities who have endured similar persecution.
- Dan Lippel
