Burlington Standard

To support relief efforts after recent devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, Saint Michael’s College and its faculty played a central role as the Green Mountain Mahler Festival presented a benefit performance of the Johannes Brahms German Requiem at the Chapel of Saint Michael the Archangel on Saturday, February 25.

Nathaniel G. Lew,  Saint Michael’s professor of music and director of the Honors Program, joined Castleton University Director of Choral Activities Sherrill Blodget to conduct the orchestra and chorus, with vocal soloists Helen Lyons of Ferrisburgh and Cameron Wescott of Poultney.

Nearly a hundred audience members heard a hundred singers and musicians presenting this special performance. Organizers encouraged donations for earthquake relief at the door and online.

Before the music started, Candas Pinar, assistant professor of sociology and public health at Saint Michael’s, offered powerful personal remarks and meaningful cultural context, speaking as a member of the Turkish American community whose parents immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s — a time of significant political unrest in Turkey, she said. [See full text of her remarks appended to the end of this article].

Professor Lew said the impetus to perform the Brahms German Requiem as a fundraiser for earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria came from Dr. Dan Weiss, head of the Green Mountain Mahler Festival.

“He remembered how powerful the 2010 fundraiser for Haiti had been,” Lew said. “That time we did the same work in the same sacred space. He called me and I jumped at the chance to revisit the work.”

Lew said Weiss and his team at the Mahler Festival handled most of the organizational side of things, putting information on the GMMF website, getting word out to participants, audience, and the media, collecting names of participants, and collecting donations.

Fr. Brian Cummings, S.S.E. ’86 welcomes Saturday’s audience to the chapel.

“They are an amazing team who can pull together an event like this in two weeks!” Lew said. “My roles really were just to secure the venue with Edmundite Campus Ministry, bring in my colleague Sherrill Blodget from Castleton University to share the conducting, and invite the soloists.”

He said that part was easy, given his longstanding close connections in Vermont’s vocal music performance community. “Helen Lyons is a wonderful local soprano, a native Vermonter, who works at Vermont Public Classical,” he said, “and Cameron Wescott is a phenomenally talented graduating music major at Castleton, who covered for the soloist in this exact piece last November, so I had heard him and knew he would fill the house.”

Lew said another piece of his preparation for the concert was to “refresh my memory of the piece, which is pretty solid. This was my third time conducting the work, and as a singer, I have performed it four more times.

“It is definitely a challenge to perform a 70-minute work with only one day of rehearsals,” said Lew. “The chorus members for the most part already knew the piece, since it is one of the most beloved and performed major choral works. In the orchestra, on the other hand, many if not most of the players had never played it before. And there are a lot of notes, especially for the strings, for whom Brahms writes characteristically complicated overlapping accompaniment patterns.”

He said beyond those challenges are “several famously tricky transitions, where one section of a movement fades or crashes into the next section, with a new key, meter, and tempo. Those are the places where one wishes one had more rehearsal. But, really everything went remarkably well in performance.”

For the singers and wind players especially, it was a very long day, Lew said. “We had two two-hour rehearsals, an hour break, and then a 90-minute concert. Both Professor Blodget and I had to remind the singers not to give their all in the dress rehearsal, but to save their best sound and full volume for the concert, which they did.”

Lew said he was delighted to see such a large audience, “and they clearly understood the spirit of the event, connected both with the music and the message, and donated generously” – more than $5,000.

“I am also very grateful to Fr. Brian Cummings (S.S.E. ’86) for letting us use the Chapel – no space could be better! – And for being there for the entire event, helping to set up and put everything back when we were done. It’s a lot of work to take over the Chapel like that, but it is worth it!”

*

Introductory remarks by Professor Candas Pinar:

Good evening and thank you all for attending and supporting this important event.

My name is Candas Pinar and I’m an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Saint Michael’s College. But I speak tonight as a member of the Turkish American community. My parents immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, a time of significant political unrest in Turkey. I was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, grew up in Rhode Island, but have spent much of my life traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Turkey, living in Ankara and Istanbul for many years.

When news arrived early on February 6 that a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and a powerful aftershock had hit Turkey and Syria, I, like so many others with family abroad, frantically took to WhatsApp to check in. My parents and I counted ourselves lucky. We confirmed that, yes, my-89-year-old grandmother who lives alone in Ankara and who had survived the worst of the COVID pandemic was safe and that, yes, my uncles and aunts and cousins were alright too.

Professor Candas Pinar addresses the audience to offer relevant context from her personal connection to the region hard-hit by recent earthquakes.

But, of course, we weren’t left untouched. As the hours and days elapsed, far less fortunate news trickled in. A distant cousin had lost their life, family friends had lost their homes. A dear friend drove 24 hours from Istanbul to Adiyaman in southeastern Turkey to help his mother and sister who had been left stranded in the snow without a home and without running water, electricity, or cell phone service.

The February 6 earthquake in Turkey and Syria and its aftershock destroyed more than 100,000 buildings, killed more than 46,000 people, and left more than a million without homes. It was the deadliest earthquake worldwide since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the deadliest natural disaster in Turkey’s modern history. Two weeks following the first earthquake, almost unimaginably, a second, 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck the city of Kahramanmaras in southeastern Turkey.

I can’t [overstate] the scope of the loss that Turkey and Syria and we, the global community, have incurred as a result of these earthquakes.

The region in Turkey most affected by the earthquakes was one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse parts of the country, and home to many of the 4 million Syrian refugees who live in Turkey. This is a part of the world that was once part of the Hittite, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman Empires. Antakya (also called Hatay), one of the cities left most devastated by the earthquakes, is the site of ancient Antioch, built in 300 BCE. Some of Anatolia’s oldest mosques, such as the Habib-I Neccar Mosque, have been decimated. The Orthodox Church in Antakya, the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate until the 14th century, was destroyed. In Gaziantep, where my paternal grandfather was born, the earthquake all but destroyed the 2,000-year-old Gaziantep Castle, which had been built in the Roman period. I feel profound gratitude that a fortuitous trip in my 20s allowed me to visit many of these precious sites and immense heartbreak that I may never be able to share them with my own daughter.

I am so thankful for tonight’s event for many reasons. For the reminder that my husband and I chose to raise our daughter in Vermont because this is a community that supports and lifts those in need. And for the opportunity to exercise agency at a time when members of the Turkish and Turkish American community feel so utterly helpless. Thank you to everyone who organized and is contributing to this evening’s concert, thank you to everyone sitting in the audience this evening, and thank you to everyone who has donated.

Original source can be found here.