It seems that as I get older, anything and everything can turn out to be a reminder, an echo, or a reminiscence.
Last night I attended an excellent performance by a local chamber group, the Regal Ensemble. They performed three works, and in each of them I could find some personal meaning.
The first piece was a set of variations for piano and strings by a Ukrainian composer I had never heard of (nor have you, probably): Vasyl Barvinsky (1888-1963). What’s his connection to me? He was arrested in 1948, the year I was born, by the NKVD and sent to a concentration camp for ten years. During that period his manuscripts perished in a fire. What was his crime? The sources are tantalizingly vague. Just being Ukrainian and writing music based on Ukrainian folk tunes was probably enough. In 1948 the world was still congratulating itself on having defeated Hitler, but it was also dealing with Stalinism, the Red Menace, and the Bomb. We thought we had defeated Fascism, conveniently forgetting that Franco was still in power. In 2025, we’re looking fascism in the face again, right here at home, and the Ukrainians are still fighting for their lives.
The next pieces had purely personal resonance. The second performance was of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. These songs, along with the Kindertotenlieder, were some of the first pieces I worked on with singers in college in the late 1960s, when I started to accompany and found that I both enjoyed it and was good at it. I knew little or no Mahler at the time, and these songs blew me away.
The third performance was of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet Op. 81 — one of my favorite pieces for many years. By coincidence, I had been assigned the third movement of this quintet this summer at a chamber music workshop in Sacramento and had spent a day working on it with a group of string players. I had also read through the entire quintet a few years earlier at another workshop, not as an assignment, but in “freelancing” — the term used at these workshops for people getting together after the day’s scheduled activities, to play just for fun. The performance was excellent and very enjoyable, but it reminded me how much I miss the camaraderie of informal music making. I’ve been accompanying at the University, and that’s rewarding, but the atmosphere is quite different when you’re accompanying a student who is on a professional track, in the presence of the teacher.
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