In The Jewish Week, George Robinson quoted Patrick Summers, the artistic and music director of the Houston Grand Opera who stated:
The Passenger’s score is unique in musical history (…) It’s a work of art that remembers the Holocaust without commenting upon it. It remembers it [through] authors who were actually there and experienced it first-hand. I admire enormously the anger that is in the score, the anger at society; I also admire its extraordinarily intelligence. It does not sentimentalize, it does not offer a moral, it does not tie anything up. It records a particular story that is very incendiary and very disturbing and very moving. It asks only one thing – it asks us to remember.
In a similar vein, The New Yorker's critic Alex Ross reflected on the The Passenger's staging:
Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera (…) comes closer than any other extant opera to overcoming the challenge of placing the Holocaust onstage.Weinberg’s most substantial achievement is to hint at the inhuman energies that lurk behind all the shining surfaces of modern life. The most chilling music in the score is the light jazz that plays on board the ship; it is the sound of indifference.
In Boston Sunday Globe, Jeremy Eichler remarked:
Weinberg’s score is a masterful mix of styles, by turns expressionistic, sarcastic, and at times purposefully banal, but the piece nonetheless sits uneasily with contemporary sensibilities regarding the Holocaust and its artistic representation.
Before each performance, the ARC Ensemble (Artists of the Royal Conservatory Canada) offered performances of Weinberg’s chamber music, which were open to the public. The ensemble was comprised of distinguished alumni of The Glenn Gould School. Artistic director Simon Wynberg was responsible for Music in Exile, a series of programs featuring music associated with the Nazi terror and the history of twentieth-century Europe.
July 10th: From the Lyrics of Baratinsky,op. 125 (1979), Songs for Double Bass and Piano; Piano Trio, op. 24 (1945)
July 11th: Cello Sonata no. 2, Op. 63 (1958); Violin Sonata no. 1, Op. 12 (1943)
July 12th: Piano Quintet, op. 18 (1945)
Mieczysław Weinberg was born on December 8, 1919. During the Second World War, he made his way to Minsk, before being evacuated to Tashkent and eventually settling in Moscow. In the 1950s he was arrested on charges of spreading “Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” Eminent Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, a friend and neighbor of the Polish-Jewish Weinberg, interceded on his behalf. Weinberg composed several dozen symphonies, concertos, choral music, chamber music and film scores (including that for the legendary Soviet war film The Cranes are Flying). He also composed no less than seven operas.
A screening of Andrzej Munk’s film adaptation of The Passenger took place in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse. The screening was followed by a discussion with Zofia Posmysz, author and Holocaust survivor whose book Passenger from Cabin 45 was the basis for the opera, and Holocaust survivors Esther Bauer, Sam Cukier, and Jerry Jacobs.
On the 11th of July, there was another opportunity to participate in the discussion with Zofia Posmysz, author of Passenger from Cabin 45, which took place in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse. The conversation was moderated by Mena Mark Hanna, assistant artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera.
Music: Mieczysław Weinberg, Libretto adaptation: David Pountney, Conductor: Patrick Summers, Director: David Pountney, Based on the novel by Zofia Posmysz, Houston Grand Opera, Orchestra, and Chorus
Sources: Press materials, author’s materials, ed. fl 10.06.2014, trans. Alena Aniskiewicz 12.06.2014