Jonathan Dove
's
In Exile
is unique in both its structure and its treatment of text. The work is dedicated to the mother of cellist
Raphael Wallfisch
; she survived Auschwitz partly because she played in a women's orchestra there.
Wallfisch
's father and brother fled Germany for Palestine, and the text, as the title promises, is a meditation on exile. The work is a kind of concerto for baritone, cello, and orchestra, with the baritone and the cello, in the words of annotator
Paul Conway
, "expressing complementary aspects of the same character. The solo cello is the alter ego of the baritone, ranging above and below his voice, able to take his song down into the depths and up into the heights." It is an effective configuration that nobody else has quite hit on before. However, the texts take it to the next level. They also feature lines circling around a central core, namely an anonymous 10th century poem called "The Wayfarer," which is translated into modern English. The other texts range from
Shakespeare
("What country, friends, is this?, from Twelfth Night, which recurs) to modern times, and they outline a rough procession of day part from dawn to dusk, with a separate Night Song to bring down the curtain. What is most interesting about this is how the texts fundamentally shape the music, adding variety and persuasiveness to material that might have seemed didactic. Sample the ninth of the 11 parts of
, "Unclean," to a text by poet
Kaveh Bassiri
consisting of single words with the prefix "un-" that are stereotypically used to describe immigrants and exiles.
and baritone
Simon Keenlyside
provide exemplary performances in this live recording of the work's premiere in Birmingham, England, which had some electricity in the air. Performers looking to fill Holocaust programs should definitely hear
Dove
's work, which is a fine example of its memorial type. ~ James Manheim