by James Oestreich
Persecution and Promise: A Legacy of Czech Music,” a program of music and talk at the Buttenwieser Hall of the 92nd Street Y on Monday evening, featured several piquant musical effects and strange sounds — or, indeed, nonsounds.
Jaroslav Jezek’s jazzy “Bugatti Step” for piano (1930) opened with bright chiming from the instrument, meant to evoke a car horn (that of a Bugatti, of course). In the premiere of Eliska Cilkova’s String Quartet No. 3 (“Inspired by the Work of Jiri Pick”), the cellist, Thomas Kraines, replicated the call of a sea gull at the start. Later, he drew his bow across the instrument’s tailpiece, producing sound that I could hear only, I think, in my imagination: a slight brushing noise?
But for sheer weirdness, nothing can top the theremin, heard in Bohuslav Martinu’s Fantasie for theremin, oboe, piano and strings (1945). An electronic instrument whose sound sometimes resembles human vocalise, the theremin whoops and wails eerily in response to hand gestures near, but not touching, its antenna.
The program also included string quartets by Viktor Ullmann (No. 3, 1943) and Viktor Kalabis (No. 5, “In Memory of Marc Chagall,” 1984), played by the Daedalus Quartet, which anchored the concert. These quartets, along with the Jezek and Martinu works, were “written in the face of different kinds of extreme hardships and challenges,” according to a program note by Deborah Bradley-Kramer, the evening’s pianist and the artistic director of the musicians’ collective Speakmusic, which also took part.
A recurring theme was the experience of inmates of the Nazi concentration camp in the Czech town of Terezin, where Ullmann and Pick, a playwright, were imprisoned. Ullmann was killed in Auschwitz in 1944. Pick later wrote a play, “The Unlucky Man in the Yellow Cap,” and a novel, “The Society for the Protection of Animals,” based on his time in Terezin. His sister, Zuzana Justman, who also survived the camp, took part in a postconcert discussion on Monday.
The varied musical works, all worthy, received fine performances. Elizabeth Brown merits special mention for doing effectively whatever it is you have to do to coax music out of a theremin.