Traces of trauma: Britten Sinfonia premiere Michael Zev Gordon’s A Kind of Haunting marking 80th anniversary of the end of World War II

Image of Michael Zev Gordon’s Grandfather, Zalman & memorial to those killed in the forest in Poland

Martinu: Double Concerto, Strauss: Metamorphosen, Michael Zev Gordon: A Kind of Haunting; James Newby, Louisa Clein, Allan Corduner, Britten Sinfonia, Jonathan Berman; Milton Court Concert Hall
Reviewed 25 March 2025

Two composers’ direct experience of the traumas of the Second World War alongside Michael Zev Gordon’s powerful and remarkable new piece about his family’s experience of the Holocaust and the traces of trauma that come in its wake

Britten Sinfonia are in the middle of a short series of concerts marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. To come, is a performance of Messiaen’s mighty Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum with the orchestra joining forces with Sinfonia Smith Square at St George’s Cathedral, Southwark on 30 April [see website].

But on Tuesday 25 March 2025, Jonathan Berman conducted Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican’s Milton Court concert hall in a programme that moved from the beginning of the war to the end, with Martinu’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra, piano & Timpani from 1938, Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen from 1945, and the premiere of Michael Zev Gordon‘s A Kind of Haunting with narrators Louisa Clein and Allan Corduner, and baritone James Newby.

Martinu wrote the Double Concerto in France and on holiday in Switzerland with Paul Sacher and his wife, and it would be Sacher who premiered the work in 1940 with his Basel Chamber Orchestra. The work’s rhythmic energy, driving momentum and sheer fierceness all help contribute to the feeling that Martinu was writing about the situation in Europe and the threat of war. But the music also has something of the clipped rhythm and neo-Baroque spikiness of Stravinsky’s writing at the period (e.g. Dumbarton Oaks which dates from 1937-38). 

For this performance, Jonathan Berman conducted the strings of Britten Sinfonia with Huw Watkins, piano, and Charlie Hodge, timpani. The opening movement, Poco Allegro was edge of the seat stuff, with the combination of fierce energy, jazzy rhythms and driving force. It was clear where Berman and his musicians’ sympathies lay, and even the more relaxed sections with their intense yet lyrical counterpoint had a sort of spare violence to them. Though there were plenty of moments when momentum relaxed, there was a sense of a driving force never letting up. The middle movement, marked Largo was anything but lyrical and relaxed. Here the intense, richly complex textures pushed lyricism to its limits, all underpinned by big piano chords. There were times when Huw Watkins’ performance, however poised, felt a bit too discreet and I wanted him to dominate more. But in the middle of the Largo he gave us a wonderfully intense neo-Bachian solo that was powerful indeed, yet when the strings lyricism returned it was underpinned by driving rhythms. The ending was quiet, but this was no resolution, it was positively bleak. The Allegro finale returned us to the vivid excitement and edge of the seat performance of the opening. Terrific stuff.

After a change of layout for the platform, Zoe Beyers’ directed Strauss’ Metamorphosen from the violin. Strauss’ 1945 work for 23 solo strings, written when the composer was 81, represents his memorial to the loss of Austro-German culture, triggered by the destruction of the opera houses in Munich, Dresden and Vienna, the three operatic centres most associated with his music. The work uses rather more lower instruments than a normal string orchestra and we began with the wonderfully mellow sound of five cellos and three basses. The speed was steady, as the sections of the orchestra passed the lyrical material around. This was a muscular, active performance very much focused on strong tone, we never got the luxuriance of high-sheen string playing. Instead, this focused on the sheer texture of the individual lines. As the music became more mobile, I enjoyed the way individual lines appeared and disappeared. Though the speed became more urgent as the cascades of textures developed, there was always a sense of ebb and flow, muscular, vibrant tone and sheer hard work. However, we never quite reached the ultimate in orgasm that some performance of this work achieve, here was a more expressive melancholy mellowness.

Back in February, I chatted to composer Michael Zev Gordon about his new piece, A Kind of Haunting [see my interview]. The work represents Gordon’s attempt to come to terms with his family’s history in the Holocaust; his grandfather, Zalman, was killed in a forest north-east of Warsaw, one of the approximately 1.5 million Jews killed during the operation often called the ‘Holocaust by Bullets’.

But the piece is not so much about the event, as about the memory of it (or lack) and the silence that surrounded it as Gordon grew up. In A Kind of Haunting, Gordon presents us with his own narrative detailing first the silence around the event, then his discovery via his grandmother’s memoir (originally written in Yiddish) and finally his journey back to the forest where his grandfather was killed. This narrative, however, is intercut with a different one as words by Marianne Hirsch provided a sort of commentary, stepping back and considering the effects of memory and post-memory. A third strand was more abstract poems by Jacqueline Saphra.

Gordon’s chosen form was, intriguingly, melodrama, the combination of spoken text and music. Allan Corduner spoke Gordon’s words, whilst Louisa Clein spoke Hirsch’s, the two often intercutting each other. Both actors were miked and under them, creating a sort of continuous commentary on the unfolding story, was the string orchestra conducted by Jonathan Berman. Punctuating this narrative, in the manner of the arias in a Bach passion, were arias sung by James Newby setting Saphra’s words.

There is no doubt at all that this was a powerful story, deserving to be told. Clein, Corduner and Newby were all intensely involved in their performances, and even when not actually speaking or singing you sensed they were part of the action, with Clein and Corduner reacting to every little gesture from others. Corduner’s narrative really gripped, and it was made more powerful by the way Clein’s rather dryer voice speaking Hirsch’s thoughts intercut and commented. 

Gordon used the orchestra to colour the narrative, and my only quibble was that I felt that at times the music was not an equal partner to the spoken text, that the narrative was so gripping it held up on its own. But from the first sighing motifs in the strings through to the final throbbing keening, Gordon’s music provided a series of striking textures, using quite a narrow range of motifs to striking effect, always heightening the narrative and contributing to the tension.

The five arias sung by James Newby had rather more abstract texts and here Newby gave us a wonderfully alert, full vocal line that had a life of its own. Newby’s strong, at times bleak, arioso standing alone and just a web of string motifs around it. Newby made these moments really matter and this was a performance truly invested in the moment.

Towards the end of the story, as the narrator returns to the scene of his grandfather’s execution, text and music brought out the time shift, the sense that past and present were still haunted by each other. The ending, as the two narrators attempt to form a resolution of sorts, was profoundly moving but there was a feeling that, musically, Gordon felt he could not quite let go of the music.