Composer gives new life to Jewish melodies

BANGOR — Three summers ago in Israel, composer and concert pianist Lee Mitchell found some melodies. They were lovely melodies, the kind sung in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. They were haunting melodies, the kind composed in the concentration camps of the Holocaust.

Though the anonymous composers and singers of the music are lost to the world forever and those who first heard it are long dead, the music survives. And more than half a century after its discovery, it still has the power to move people.

The music so deeply affected Mitchell, he took four of the melodies and incorporated them into his own compositions, which was not much of a stretch for the composer as his own musical language is based in the Jewish tradition.

Mitchell, who makes his home in his native Wilmington, Del., performed one of the four melodies, “The poet’s song about his little daughter,” along with other selections last Sunday at All Souls Congregational Church.

The composer’s roots are Jewish. In 1908, his maternal grandfather moved his family from Holland to North America, destroying all papers that identified them as Jews. The textile worker and his family made their way to Calgary, Alberta, where the Canadian government gave the Mitchell family a parcel of land to farm.

“My great-grandfather was not a farmer,” he said in an interview a few days before the concert. “They had some very hard times. My grandmother said she remembered a time when a snowstorm came up so quickly they were unable to get the cows into the barn. They literally froze in their tracks.

“The family made a pact that they would speak no more Yiddish or Dutch. They even celebrated Christmas and other Christian holidays out of fear. That was passed on to my mother.

“Children in my generation had to find our tradition,” he said. “We had to find out what it was like to be Jewish. In her old age, my grandmother talked very openly about her memories of Europe and her childhood.”

One of the families she remembered was named Frank. As Mitchell stood in front of the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam one time, a melody came to him that reflects the tragedy of the girl’s life, as well as her hopes and aspirations. Sunday he performed “Melody in Minor for Anne Frank,” holding the last sad note that ends the piece a long, long time, closing his eyes as if in prayer.

“In every Jewish home, the Holocaust has touched someone, somewhere, somehow,” he told his audience. “For me, it was not anyone I knew personally, but my grandmother told me that only a couple of family members survived.”

Mitchell composed his “Cycle of Five Sacred Songs of David” using five psalms as inspiration in 1976. The next year he composed “Noah’s Ark” with its four etudes for piano. He has composed Christian music, including a Christmas oratorio, “The Holy Child is Born,” and an Easter anthem, “The Lord is Risen,” which will be perfomed next year by the All Souls choirs.

Mitchell retired from his professorship of music at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University Conservatory of Music in Baltimore 12 years ago to devote himself to composing and performing. He spends five months of the year in Switzerland, where he received his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Berne.

A tall, thin reed of a man with wispy red hair, Mitchell does not look as if he has the soul of a musician. Yet when he plays, his sacred melodies become holy. He energizes the notes with his faith in God and in music until it makes believers of all who hear it.

“The concert was really intense,” said Avram White-Rogers of Penobscot and a member of Beth Israel, the Conservative synagogue in Bangor. “I found a real stirring in my soul and it reminded me of some of our liturgy.”

Catherine “Kay” Byther, the music director at All Souls, was “thrilled with the concert and his music. I was impressed with his technique, the power he had in his hands. He didn’t do a whole lot of leaning into the keyboard, he just sat down and played. It was a powerful experience.”

Mitchell performed on the Arlan A. Baillie grand piano given to All Souls last year. Named for the church’s former pastor, the 1916 Model B Steinway piano was painstakingly restored and donated by the Christopher Hutchins family in memory of Ruth and Curtis Hutchins. Christopher Hutchins was a 6-year-old Sunday school pupil when Baillie became pastor of the church in 1943. He said the pastor had an enormous influence on him.

“This instrument is just about perfectly suited to that room [the sanctuary],” said the Rev. James Haddix, current pastor at All Souls. “People seem to respond differently during services to the piano than they do to the organ. They become more focused, more quiet. There is a different feel to the service.”

Mitchell said that although the church has had the instrument for a year, it has not yet been played enough to be broken in.

“This is typical of what happens when a piano is renovated,” he said after the concert. “The felts need to be worked so that the strings make indentations in them. The sound is not focused, but it does have a beautiful Steinway tone. I have never seen a case of burled mahogany like this in a piano this large. The church is very fortunate. This piano is very special.”

While Mitchell has written many works for solo instruments, voice, chamber music, orchestra, organ and piano, his work in progress includes a concerto for organ and orchestra and a sacred oratorio based on the book of Jonah. Both will premiere in Switzerland next year.

The next concert in the Baillie series will be presented by Baycka Voronietsky Jan. 10. In the spring, a recital will feature the talents of youth and adult piano students and their teachers.

“Arlan believed that good music required two components: excellent performers and excellent listeners,” said his widow, Margaret Baillie, at the dedication last November. “It was great. Just wonderful,” she said after Mitchell’s performance. “Arlan would be so pleased this is happening.”