MOR Returns To Bay Area With Music By Jake Heggie

On Tuesday, May 19, 2020 at 7:30 p.m., Music of Remembrance (MOR) presents a concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall featuring a rare double bill of works by the incomparable team of composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer. Tickets are $60 and $75 and available at www.musicofremembrance.org.

Following the work's January 2020 world premiere by Music at Kohl Mansion (Burlingame), MOR performs Heggie and Scheer's Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope (2019). The song cycle was inspired by a rare collection of Holocaust string instruments that belonged to Jews who played them before and during the Holocaust. Lovingly restored over the past two decades, these precious instruments can now sing again even though their former owners were silenced. Bay Area audiences had the opportunity to see and hear many of these historic instruments in concert during the Violins of Hope two-month residency hosted by Music at Kohl Mansion.

Heggie and Scheer's dramatic song cycle is scored for a solo violinist, a solo singer as the voice of the violin, and string quartet. Each song "intones," telling a story from the perspective of the violin itself. Through music and words they explore the physical and emotional journeys of the instruments and their owners. The performance features Metropolitan Opera mezzo soprano Laura Krumm along with MOR's stellar string quartet drawn from the members of the Seattle Symphony, and violin soloist Mikhail Shmidt.

The program also features For a Look or a Touch, the earliest of four Heggie/Scheer works that MOR has commissioned and premiered over the past decade. The first musical work ever to explore the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, it is based on the true story of two idealistic young gay men in 1930s Berlin whose lives and love were torn apart under Nazi rule. MOR's production, directed by Erich Parce, features rising operatic star baritone Jarrett Ott as Manfred Lewin, along with actor Curt Branom, a beloved fixture of San Francisco's Beach Blanket Babylon, in the role of Gad Beck. The work bears inspiring witness to the power of love, courage and memory.

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