Exploring Roma persecution in Shoah ‘Remembrance’ concert

Kouyoumdjian’s composition, in a program titled “Mirror of Memory,” was performed Wednesday, May 24, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music — three days after the world premiere in Seattle. The program included San Francisco Opera mezzo-soprano Catherine Cook singing Yiddish songs written in the Vilna Ghetto.

Stojka, who survived the Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen camps, went on to write three autobiographies that focused on Nazi persecution of Roma. She began painting at the age of 56, and her artwork was heavily based on depiction of the death camps, where her father and one of her five brothers were killed. She died in 2013.

Miller, who founded the Seattle-based nonprofit Music of Remembrance, said she felt it was time to focus on the plight of Gypsies, who like Jews were deemed racially inferior by the Nazis and targeted for extinction.

Last year, Miller, the daughter of Holocaust refugees who lost all their family members, commissioned an opera by Jake Heggie that was based on the writings of a Polish dissident and a gay man. “When you think about the victims of the Holocaust — the 6 million Jews, the gays, the Gypsies, political dissidents, journalists — it’s been the goal of Music of Remembrance from the beginning to illuminate not just the tragedy of the Jews but others as well,” she said. Kouyoumdjian, an Armenian American who grew up in Pleasant Hill and now is working toward her doctorate in music composition at Columbia University, is a big fan of Roma music and said it’s similar to Armenian tunes.

Her 26-minute piece based on Stojka’s artwork, “to open myself, to scream,” is scored for violin, cello, bass, clarinet and trumpet. It includes live music and an electronic track recorded by the musicians, the latter symbolizing a survivor’s reflections on the past.

With Stojka, “There’s this constant burden of a horrific past. She’s sort of exploring these horrific things that make no sense,” Kouyoumdjian said. “A lot of people who have gone through genocide feel this too; they create artwork to express their feelings.”