Honoring the murdered composers, Music of Remembrance is scheduled to be held starting from 28th February

The fourth and final virtual concert of this unique season put the focus on the Armenian genocide with the Return to Amasia by American composer Eric Hachikian. The reports have it that during and after World War I, about one and a half million ethnic Armenians in Turkey and its adjacent regions were methodically murdered or had been expelled by the Ottoman authorities. Hachikian is the grandson of the survivors from the genocide and Return to Amasia is an intimate musical and visual account of his journey to that city in search of his roots. Fragments of the music have been adapted from Hachikian’s score for Voyage to Amasia, the feature-length documentary film that he had reportedly produced. Viewers can view the complete film when they screen it online around the time of the concert.

The three other works of the program are also products of their composers’ odysseys. Born as Mikhail Isaakovich Levin in Kiev, Michel Michelet soon became a pioneering cinema composer in France with the emergence of sound film in the 1930s. After the German invaded, he took his work to Hollywood were some of his notable movie credits included several important films noirs. Paul Ben Haim was born Paul Frankenburger in Munich. Moreover, at the beginning of the Nazi rule in 1933, he championed exclusive Jewish national music. Geza Frid, who is that famous Hungarian Dutchman, was born in a region of Hungary that is presently a part of Romania. For escaping poverty and the rising anti-Semitism, he had settled in the Netherlands in the late 1920s and had established as a pianist and a composer. For being a stateless Jew during the German occupation, he was unable to work but had surprisingly escaped from the capture and deportation. All those years, he had organized the clandestine concerts and for being a part of the Dutch underground he had helped forge the identity cards and had also participated in an artist’s resistance movement.

Michelet, Frid, and Ben Haim are amongst those few who had survived and had resumed their distinguished musical lives for decades after the war. Their respective stories, like that of the composer Eric Hachikian and the family he used to lovingly remember, are evidence of the diligence of the creative spirit. In the scheduled concert, their music shall be brought under the spotlight by Music of Remembrance’s stellar performers, where all of them are drawn from the ranks of the Seattle Symphony.

The broadcast is all to begin on February 28 at 5 pm Pacific and shall be available until March 7.

The detailed list goes as:

Michel Michelet – Elegie

 Mikhail Shmidt, violin

 Natasha Bazhanov, violin

 Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola

 Sarah Rommel, cello

 Jessica Choe, piano

Géza Frid – Podium Suite, Op. 3

 Mikhail Shmidt, violin

 Jessica Choe, piano

Paul Ben-Haim – Three Songs Without Words

 Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola

 Valerie Muzzolini Gordon, harp

Eric Hachikian – Return to Amasia (world premiere)

 Mikhail Shmidt, violin

 Natasha Bazhanov, violin

 Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola

 Sarah Rommel, cello