There is memory, but there is also “post-memory”. Mingled with the recollection of our own life stories, we humans also carry those of others, told or sometimes concealed by those we once knew, or even never met. But what is passed down becomes ours too. This interwoven fabric of past, present and future is the rewarding inspiration behind Michael Zev Gordon’s compelling and intelligent new concert piece, A Kind of Haunting.
Gordon’s substantial setting is for two narrators, baritone and string orchestra. Premiered by the Britten Sinfonia under Jonathan Berman, it proves true to its title. The score explores Gordon’s search for his Polish Jewish ancestors, murdered in the Holocaust in 1941: an event of which Gordon’s own father barely spoke, and which the composer and his own children now own too. The focus is on the haunting not just the horror. As Gordon says, the work explores the potency of the Holocaust’s aftereffects – a gift and a curse, as Marianne Hirsch’s narration has it.
Gordon’s music is deceptively fragmentary. It starts with a shard of lullaby which disappears and reappears without crystalising. Other patterns and phrases recur and rebuild. But the structure is always clear and controlled. There is a strong focus on text, suggesting Gordon does not want the music to become too overwhelming. Occasionally it feels a little too restrained for what is being described, but Gordon’s artistic tact pays dividends in the final pages. One narrator, the excellent Allan Corduner, depicts the search. The second, Louisa Clein, reflects, equally convincingly, on the meaning of the interwoven memories. James Newby brings vocalism of great nuance and controlled solemnity to five reflective arias of mounting intensity to texts by the poet Jacqueline Saphra.
The opening half of the concert brought two contrasting masterworks of the Holocaust era itself. Under Berman, the Sinfonia played Martinů’s Concerto for double string orchestra, piano and timpani with full toned ferocity. One had to remind oneself that the concerto, with Huw Watkins a formidable piano soloist, was written in 1938, before the events it otherwise seems to embody so strongly. Strauss’s Metamorphosen, premiered in 1946, is a work of an altogether different kind, with violinist Zoë Beyers leading the 23 string players in a performance whose intimacy captured the veteran composer’s vast sense of loss.
• This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 9 April
• The Britten Sinfonia: 1945: A Kind of Haunting is at Elgar Concert Hall, Birmingham on 26 March and Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden on 28 March
• This article was amended on 26 March 2025. An earlier version misspelled the surname of Zoë Beyers.
