Black Oak Ensemble Makes Recording Debut With 'Silenced Voices' On Cedille Records

Black Oak Ensemble, a string trio featuring three of Chicago's most enterprising chamber musicians, will make its recording debut July 12, 2019, with Silenced Voices, an album of intriguing works by six promising, early 20th century Jewish composers originally from Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands.

One survived World War II as a member of the Dutch resistance, the others perished in concentration camps and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Silenced Voices includes Dick Kattenburg's Trio à cordes; Sándor Kuti's Serenade for String Trio; Hans Krása's Passacaglia & Fuga and Tánec for string trio; Gideon Klein's Trio for violin, viola and cello; Paul Hermann's Strijktrio; and the world-premiere recording of wartime survivor Géza Frid's Trio à cordes, Op. 1 (Cedille Records CDR 900000 189).

Black Oak Ensemble comprises Swiss-American violinist Desirée Ruhstrat and British-born cellist David Cunliffe of the acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Lincoln Trio and French-born violist Aurélien Fort Pederzoli, a founding member of the groundbreaking, Grammy-nominated Spektral Quartet.

Silenced Voices was inspired, in part, by the educational efforts of violist Pederzoli's mother, Catherine Pederzoli-Ventura, a history teacher of Sephardic Jewish descent who led annual student field trips to locations such as Prague, Budapest, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Terezin.

Ruhstrat and Cunliffe discovered the Kuti, Krása, and Klein trios in a Budapest bookstore while on a European cultural tour with supporters of Chicago's Ravinia Festival. Further research revealed the composers' shared wartime misfortunes. Those works became the nucleus of Black Oak Ensemble's Silenced Voices project, a title suggested by Pederzoli-Ventura.

"Remarkable mastery"

Kattenburg's youthful Trio à cordes was praised in a 1938 concert review for its "remarkable mastery and a very personal style."

Kuti's Serenade for String Trio brims with Hungarian folk music and piquant chord clusters. His Franz Liszt Academy classmate, conductor Sir Georg Solti, later proclaimed that Kuti "would have become one of Hungary's greatest composers."

Krása wrote his Passacaglia & Fuga and Tánec (Dance) in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during the final year of his life. The Passacaglia is a somber work with ominous-sounding train motifs. The Fuga bears shades of Germanic and Czech influences and occasional grotesque touches. In Tánec, an aural depiction of approaching and departing trains frames a whirl of dancelike episodes.

Klein's Trio is notable for its treatment of a Moravian folk song that serves as the theme of its middle movement.

Composer-cellist Hermann's Strijktrio, a forward-looking, cosmopolitan work from the early 1920s, shares its melodies among all three instruments.

Frid's early Trio à cordes is an inventive work infused with Hungarian folk influences.

Silenced Voices was recorded by Grammy-nominated producer James Ginsburg and multiple Grammy-nominated engineer Bill Maylone on July 30-31 and September 18-19, 2018, in Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

Praised for its "flamboyant vitality" and "expert performances" (Chicago Tribune), the Black Oak Ensemble, founded in 2015, has attracted an international following. Its 2019 concert schedule includes performances in France, including Paris, Lyon, and other destinations; Geneva, Switzerland; Athens, Greece; and Terezin in the Czech Republic, as well as U.S. concert dates in Illinois, Washington, Wisconsin, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The ensemble's repertoire ranges from Baroque to new music. They recently premiered commissions from composers Michael Nyman, David Ludwig, and Conrad Tao. The string trio serves as ensemble-in-residence at the New Music School in Chicago.