The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: This Thursday morning, WORT will broadcast a live performance of Gideon Klein’s String Trio, composed in a concentration camp, by three up-and-coming musicians from the Dynamite Factory of the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society

By Jacob Stockinger

The Ear has received the following note from blog fan and local live music documentarian Rich Samuels, who hosts his radio show “Anything Goes” on Thursday morning on WORT–FM 88.9. It concerns an unusual performance of Holocaust music by a kind of apprenticeship program that The Ear really likes as a way for to provide continuity between different generations of musicians:

“At 7:26 a.m. on this Thursday morning, June 15, on my WORT broadcast I’ll be playing a performance of Gideon Klein‘s 1944 String Trio by violinist Misha Vayman, violist Jeremy Kienbaum and cellist Trace Johnson (below, from left, in a photo by Samantha Crownover).

“They are the three members of the “Dynamite Factory,” the three emerging musicians who have joined the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society for its 2017 season.

“I recorded this performance — thanks to co-artistic director Stephanie Jutt and executive director Samantha Crownover — last Thursday at an event at the Central Library of the Madison Public Library system.

Trace and Jeremy are Madison natives and alumni of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras (WYSO); Misha comes to Madison from the Russian Republic by way of southern California.

“I think it’s a compelling performance of a remarkable piece. It was the last work Klein (below) composed before he was transported from the Theresienstadt concentration camp to Auschwitz where, in a coal mining sub-camp, he died in early 1945.”