Camden Shaw finds it disconcerting that the Dover String Quartet’s forthcoming album, “Voices of Defiance 1943 1944 1945,” is relevant today.
The album includes quartets written in those years by Viktor Ullmann, Dmitri Shostakovich and Szymon Laks, three composers who suffered under totalitarian regimes. Ullmann and Laks were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps; Ullmann died in one.
“It’s a very sad moment for our country to see that these ideas [that inspired the Nazis] are still being held in certain circles,” Shaw, the quartet’s cellist, said. “We felt it important to share thoughts from people who had been through the worst of what this hatred can do when it’s allowed to grow.”
The third quartets of Ullmann and Laks will be on the program on Wednesday, Sept. 27, when the Dover Quartet opens the Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City’s season.
“These are both really powerful pieces, remarkably well composed,” Shaw said. Ullmann studied with Second Viennese School leader Arnold Schoenberg, a pioneer of 12-tone music, and with Schoenberg’s teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. “So he possessed a deep pedigree,” Shaw said. “He used Schoenberg’s ideas without being a slave to them as rules.” Thus, his music is more tonally friendly than the sounds we usually associate with Schoenberg and his school.
“Unfortunately, almost all his music was lost because of the war,” Shaw continued. “His only surviving string quartet was written in Theresienstadt.” Prisoners at the camp in present-day Czech Republic lived in marginally better conditions than at other concentration camps so that the Nazis could use them for propaganda purposes, he explained. Ullmann was transferred to Auschwitz after two years at Theresienstadt and was promptly executed, but he had left his sheet music behind.
Laks survived 2 ½ years at Auschwitz and didn’t know Ullmann personally, but he wrote about the day Ullmann and other prisoners arrived and were sent to the gas chamber. His third quartet, written in 1945 shortly after World War II ended, expresses his gratitude at having survived. “It’s sort of a celebration and homecoming,” Shaw said. “There’s a long march based on an old melody — it’s a very powerful thing.”
Like Ullmann, Laks played in one of Auschwitz’s orchestras. “It was seen as necessary by the camp directors to have music in the camp,” Shaw said. “One of the most bizarre, sociopathic, perverse things we learned about is the combination of Nazi cruelty and their true love of music and art. … It’s easier to accept them as real villains, but it’s scary because they were people. They had ideas that let them dehumanize other people, but they were still very human.”
Quartet members “pretty much always talk about the pieces a little bit” in concert, the cellist said. “The context is so powerful and important, we don’t want anyone going in not knowing the moment from which it came.”
The musicians felt so strongly about the message of these pieces that they sandwiched a benefit concert in Charlottesville, Va., into their schedule Saturday, Sept. 23. Proceeds from the concert, which includes works of Ullmann, Laks and Shostakovich, will go to the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation in the Heal Charlottesville Fund. “It was something that quickly became obvious as the right thing to do for us,” Shaw said.
The program in Salt Lake City will include music of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann in addition to the Ullmann and Laks quartets. Both those pieces pay tribute to Beethoven and show the composers’ admiration for his seminal Op. 131 String Quartet.
The Dover Quartet members, who take their name from Samuel Barber’s art song “Dover Beach,” met while students at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Shaw and violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt had been playing together since they entered the conservatory, as had violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee. In 2008, the two pairs came together and clicked. “We like to say that we were a topless quartet and they were a bottomless quartet,” Shaw said. “It was a match made in heaven.”
Four quartets<br>The Dover String Quartet opens the ChamberMusic Society of Salt Lake City season with music of Felix Mendelssohn,Szymon Laks, Viktor Ullmann and Robert Schumann.<br>When • Wednesday, Sept. 27, 7:30 p.m.<br>Where • Libby Gardner Concert Hall, 1375 E. Presidents Circle, Salt Lake City<br>Tickets • $30 at the door, $10 with student ID; see cmsofslc.org for information on season ticket options