The 13 students of Joanne Gellman Woodard’s Acting 2 class at Pius XI Catholic high school on Monday morning peered at a young man wearing a black kippah as he sang for them a phrase from the Kaddish prayer.
The man was Joshua Richman, trombonist, conductor and observant Jew. He was preparing the students for a Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concert that they will attend as a group and that will commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and will feature one of their schoolmates.
The program, to be presented in three performances on Nov. 21-23, will feature the MSO’s first performances of two Holocaust-related works: “From the Diary of Anne Frank” (1990) by American conductor/composer Michael Tilson Thomas, for full orchestra and narrator; and “Study for String Orchestra” by Pavel Haas.
Narrator for the Tilson Thomas piece is scheduled to be Raechel Zarzynski, a Pius XI sophomore who visited the Acting 2 class Monday. She told The Chronicle that she is a veteran of the First Stage Children’s Theatre and obtained the MSO gig through an open audition.
Zarzynski is thoroughly familiar with Frank, the Dutch Jewish teen who kept her famous diary while in hiding but was eventually captured and died in a death camp. Zarzynski has read the diary and many books about the Holocaust, and has visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
“I just think it is a beautiful piece” and “so powerful,” Zarzynski said of the Tilson Thomas work. She said she approaches the narration by “trying to connect my own life” to Frank’s. “She was just trying to grow up in the midst of crazy circumstances.”
The piece, as Richman described it, sounds reminiscent of music by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, and is very “approachable….” Though it has some dissonant and complex passages, it primarily is meant to portray “a child’s point of view.” It also quotes Jewish music like the Kaddish theme he sang for the students.
The Haas work also sounds approachable even though it was written in the midst of the nightmare, Richman said. Haas, a Czech Jewish composer, was one of the intellectuals and artists whom the Nazis at first confined to the “model” ghetto of Terezin; and he composed the piece for the orchestra there. He was later murdered at Auschwitz.
Richman will visit about six different high and middle schools to speak about the concert, which will also include Russian composer Serge Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5.
Richman also mentions in his presentations that he will be collaborating with the MSO and other local musicians to organize and present “A Season of Jewish Music in Milwaukee,” which will present works by Jewish composers or on Jewish subjects in December, March and April.
Tickets for the MSO concert, which is sponsored by the Northwestern Mutual Foundation, cost $16.50 to $82.50. For more information, call 1-800-291-7605.
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