M Levinas

The Passion According to Mark: a Passion after Auschwitz (DVD) Magali Léger, Marion Grange (soprano), Guilhem Terrail (countertenor), Mathieu Dubroca (bass-baritone); Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne; Ensemble Vocal de Lausanne/marc Kissóczy Belair Classiques DVD: BAC152;

Blu-ray: BAC552 87 mins

Theodor Adorno is often quoted as having said, ‘Poetry after Auschwitz is impossible’. Arguably, he didn’t mean that art cannot be created, but that it cannot but be impacted by the Nazis’ barbarism. Composer and pianist Michaël Levinas comes from a family of distinguished Jewish intellectuals that has wrestled with such questions while living with that barbarism’s devastating – and ongoing – consequences: his father was the Lithuanian-born philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95); his wife is the French philosopher and musicologist Danielle Cohen-levinas.

The Passion According to

Mark: a Passion after Auschwitz was composed for 2017’s 500th anniversary of Luther’s Reform.

It’s a deeply affecting, sometimes harrowing work for four principal and three supporting solo singers, chorus and orchestra, dedicated to the memory of Jews murdered by the Nazis and to people of all faiths and nationalities: ‘victims of the same hatred of the other and the same antisemitism’.

Cast in three, through-composed sections intended as ‘a strictly musical, in no way theological unity of form’, these comprise: the Jewish prayers for the dead of the Shoah (sung in Hebrew); the Gospel according to Mark (13th-century French); and two poems by Paul Celan (German). Together they blend narrative, action and reflection in a way that poses profound questions while expressing anguish, love and despair through the evolution of recurring motifs and symbols.

The musical language is tautly dissonant, with dense polyphony reminiscent of Schoenberg contrasting with microtonal and other deftly colouristic passages suggestive of Ligeti and Levinas’s one-time teacher Messiaen.

The performers are admirably committed under conductor

Marc Kissóczy. In this live world premiere recording, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and Ensemble vocal de Lausanne are not always translucent in the church acoustic, but soloists Magali Léger, Marion Grange, Guilhem Terrail and Mathieu Dubroca remain achingly clear.

Steph Power

PERFORMANCE ★★★★

PICTURE AND SOUND ★★★★