Music of Remembrance announces 24/25 season: ART & DEFIANCE
Paintings by Afghan composer and artist Milad Yousufi
“Through its commissions, MOR has increasingly underscored the relevance of the past to present-day threats to human rights.” –Seattle Times
Music of Remembrance 2024/25 Season
ART & DEFIANCE
Peace Imagined Elevates Compelling Plea for Afghanistan
with Rising Afghan Composer Milad Yousufi
Seattle • October 27, 2024
Art From Ashes Honors 80th International Holocaust Remembrance Day
with Northwest Boychoir and Seattle Girls Choir
Seattle • January 27, 2025
Identity Delivers Searing Depictions of Black American History
featuring Spectrum Dance in Source Code
Seattle • March 16, 2025
10th Anniversary Production of Tom Cipullo’s After Life
Seattle & San Francisco • May 18 & 21, 2025
SEATTLE, WA – August 28, 2024 – For more than a quarter-century, Seattle-based performing arts organization Music of Remembrance has built a reputation as the creative catalyst for testimonies for tomorrow – persuasive works that explore the consequences of intolerance. At its forming, MOR sought to rescue Holocaust-era composers’ music from underserved obscurity. But as the Chicago Tribune writes, “These days, MOR’s purview is broader. Its productions urge audiences to apply lessons learned from the Holocaust – or, as is too often the case, ignored – to other human rights catastrophes.” Recent premieres have included works addressing the women’s rights struggle in Iran, the separation of families at the US-Mexico border, and the threat of nuclear war.
The organization’s commitment to addressing both timeless and contemporary themes has led to collaborations with more than 20 living composers, including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jake Heggie, Lori Laitman, Mary Kouyoumdjian, and Paul Schoenfield, whose MOR commission Camp Songs was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Music. This season’s premieres bring the organization’s total commissions to 48 new works, including song cycles, chamber works, operas, film scores, and choreography – all using art to confront compelling issues in today’s world.
In the 2024/25 season, MOR champions those who use their art to stand up against injustice and inspire action. Concerts will feature a young Afghan composer’s impassioned plea for peace in his troubled country, works by prominent Black American composers that confront the residual trauma of slavery, and a 10th-anniversary production of an opera that addresses the responsibility of artists to reflect and shape society.
“Our mission continues to expand, driven by the belief that art can illuminate the lessons of the past in ways that resonate with us today,” said Artistic Director Mina Miller. “This season, we will explore the intertwining of art and defiance, recognizing the special power of music to speak directly to our hearts in ways that textbooks and newspapers cannot. As our concerts bridge generations and cultures, we hope audiences will recognize their shared humanity with characters on stage – and with each other.”
Afghan composer Milad Yousufi / Photo courtesy of artist
Peace Imagined
October 27, 2024 • Benaroya Hall in Seattle
The Seattle debut of recent Emmy® nominee Milad Yousufi, a gifted young Afghan composer whose life inspired an episode of Apple TV’s Little America, will be the centerpiece of MOR’s season opener. After witnessing the arts flourish in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s rule, Yousufi felt called to make a difference in the future of music and culture in his home country. Yousufi is also a visual artist; his poetry, painting, and Persian calligraphy helped inform Imaginary Peace and I cried, which use Bhairavi, a Phrygian mode common to Afghanistan, and other melodies to convey a sense of sorrow and longing for home.
“In my work, I aim to create a meaningful dialogue that highlights the vibrancy of my culture while countering misconceptions,” said Yousufi. “This is an investment in the artistic heritage of Afghanistan, and I believe that a legacy can be forged here in the United States for future Afghan artists to draw upon. This vital connection will allow for a more profound recognition of the shared human experience, transcending geographical and cultural boundaries.”
Sándor Kuti was also a young composer on the rise in his era; but in 1945, he was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. Nearly eight decades later, Kuti’s String Quartet No. 2 will finally receive its U.S. premiere. Audiences will also hear Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Groung, inspired by an Armenian soprano who carried the burden of her homeland’s destruction, and Simon Sargon’s musical setting of Primo Levi’s haunting literary witness to the Holocaust, depicting the battle to preserve human identity despite obliterating odds.
Members of MOR’s Chamber Ensemble / Photo by Ben van Houten
Art From Ashes
January 27, 2025 • Benaroya Hall in Seattle
As noted by Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, Music of Remembrance “exemplifies the power of music to help advance human rights and reaches into communities with cultural humility and artistic purpose.” The annual community concert with Northwest Boychoir and Seattle Girls Choir takes on special meaning this season, as Art From Ashes marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
This free concert features a wide range of musical experiences, including cabaret songs created by prisoners in the Terezín concentration camp, selections played by a prisoner orchestra in Auschwitz, and music from the Vilna and Lodz ghettos. The program also presents recent recipients of MOR’s annual David Tonkonogui Memorial Award, which nurtures young musicians who address issues of human rights through their art.
“With this program, we honor the courage and resilience of those who continued to create even in the face of horror, and we help keep their musical voices alive,” says Artistic Director Mina Miller. “To close the evening, we continue an MOR tradition with Jake Heggie’s Farewell, Auschwitz as a tribute to the power of resistance and witness.”
From left: Carlos Simon, Jessie Montgomery, and Rhiannon Giddens / Photos by Kendall Bessent, Jiyang Cheng, and Ebru Yildiz
Identity
March 16, 2025 • Benaroya Hall in Seattle
Works by three prominent Black American composers offer searing depictions of slavery, the Jim Crow era, and the continuing effects of racism in the present day. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Rhiannon Giddens created At the Purchaser’s Option with variations after finding a 19th-century advertisement for a 22-year-old female slave whose infant was also for sale, should the purchaser desire. In his Requiem for the Enslaved, Grammy-nominated composer Carlos Simon fuses elements of liturgical mass and spirituals to explore the ideology of slavery, seeking to honor the human beings owned and sold by Georgetown University, where he is an associate professor. Jessie Montgomery’s Source Code, an experimentation of rhythm and inflection built on motifs from Black spirituals, will be performed with world-premiere choreography by Spectrum Dance Theater’s Donald Byrd.
“Source Code began as transcriptions of African American artists prominent during the Civil Rights era,” said Montgomery. “I experimented by re-interpreting the gestures, sentences, and musical syntax of choreographer Alvin Ailey, poets Langston Hughes and Rita Dove, and the great jazz songstress Ella Fitzgerald. Ultimately, this exercise of listening, re-imagining, and transcribing led me back to the Black spiritual – a significant part of the DNA of Black folk music."
Identity also explores the persecution of other cultural communities, most notably in the world premiere of Tribulations by Portuguese composer Luís Tinoco, which considers the Jews forced by the Inquisition to conceal their true faith. Additional works by prolific movie composer Michel Michelet; Viktor Ullmann, a composer who rediscovered his Jewish roots in a concentration camp after being raised Catholic; and the Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk, whose music has been seen as a spiritual embodiment of Ukraine’s cultural identity during the current Russian invasion.
World premiere of After Life by Tom Cipullo and David Mason / Photo by Michael Beaton
After Life
May 18 & 21, 2025 • Seattle & San Francisco
Ten years after commissioning Tom Cipullo’s award-winning opera After Life, which the Washington Post declared a “finely wrought exploration of the role of art in times of grave crisis,” MOR will bring a newly expanded production to stages in Seattle and San Francisco. The opera imagines a confrontation between the ghosts of towering artistic figures Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, whose starkly divergent political views create a robust debate over their legacies and wartime actions.
The 10th-anniversary production introduces two new elements: a conversation with Cipullo and librettist David Mason, and a musical soirée set in the home of Stein and Alice B. Toklas, with selections by composers they might have hosted at one of their legendary gatherings on Paris’s Left Bank. First envisioned for Jake Heggie’s Before It All Goes Dark, this tripartite structure was declared by San Francisco Classical Voice to be “a striking fusion of intensity and emotional range, historical context and dramatic immediacy.”
Peace Imagined
Sunday, October 27, 2024 @ 5:00 pm
US Premiere: String Quartet No. 2 by Sándor Kuti
with Mikhail Shmidt & Natasha Bazhanov, violins; Artur Girsky, viola; and Walter Gray, cello
Seattle Premieres: Imaginary Peace and I cried by Milad Yousufi
with Vanessa Isiguen, soprano, Milad Yousufi, doumbek, and MOR Chamber Ensemble
Plus works by Mary Kouyoumdjian, Simon Sargon, and Erwin Schulhoff; and a conversation with Milad Yousufi
Benaroya Hall (200 University Street)
Seattle, Washington
Tickets $60; Students $25 (ID required)
musicofremembrance.org/peace
Art From Ashes
Monday, January 27, 2025 @ 5:30pm
Commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
In collaboration with Northwest Boychoir, and Seattle Girls Choir
Benaroya Hall (200 University Street)
Seattle, Washington
Tickets: Free. Reserved seating, reservations required.
musicofremembrance.org/ashes
Identity
Sunday, March 16, 2025 at 5:00 pm
World Premiere: Tribulations
Created by Luís Tinoco, composer, with text by Samuel Usque
with Vanessa Isiguen, soprano and MOR Chamber Ensemble
World Premiere: Source Code
Choreographed by Donald Byrd to existing music by Jessie Montgomery
with Spectrum Dance, and MOR Chamber Ensemble
Plus works by Rhiannon Giddens, Michael Michelet, Carlos Simon, Myroslav Skoryk, Viktor Ullmann, and Geeshie Wiley
Benaroya Hall (200 University Street)
Seattle, Washington
Tickets $60; Students $25 (ID required)
musicofremembrance.org/identity
After Life
Sunday, May 18, 2025 at 4:00pm (Seattle)
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 7:30pm (San Francisco)
Created by Tom Cipullo, composer, and David Mason, librettist
with Alastair Willis, conductor, Erich Parce, director, and Peter Crompton, media designer
Picasso: Michael Mayes
Gertrude: Gabrielle Beteag
Youth: Alisa Jordheim
Chamber Ensemble
Demarre McGill, flute
Laura DeLuca, clarinet
Mikhail Shmidt, violin
Eric Han, cello
Jessica Choe, piano
Sunday, May 18, 2025 @ 4:00pm
Seattle, Washington
Benaroya Hall (200 University Street)
Tickets $60; Students $25 (ID required)
musicofremembrance.org/afterlife
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 @ 7:30pm
San Francisco, California
Presidio Theatre (99 Moraga Avenue)
Tickets $40-75
musicofremembrance.org/afterlifesf
Established in 1998, Music of Remembrance (MOR) has made a unique impact through works that honor the resilience of all people excluded or persecuted for faith, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. Its programs pay tribute to historic memory, and directly confront challenges to human rights and dignity today. In addition to its work discovering and performing music from the Holocaust, MOR is admired around the world for its leadership in commissioning and premiering new works by leading composers, including varied chamber ensembles, song cycles, choral works, dance music, film scores, musical dramas, and full-length operas. MOR’s online concerts, nine albums, three documentary films, and many outreach programs have added to the impact experienced by live audiences. MOR’s annual David Tonkonogui Memorial Award welcomes new generations along on this journey, nurturing young musicians who seek to address issues of human rights through their art.
Press Contact: Beth Stewart
Verismo Communications
Tel: 618.444.3183 | Email: beth@verismopr.com
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