Music@Menlo holds solemn chamber music for winds, pianos

Another work on the program was influenced by the Nazi occupation. Pavel Haas wrote his Suite, Op. 17, for oboe and piano in 1939, just as the Germans were invading Czechoslovakia. Haas’s defiant Czech patriotism is detectable in his use of the Czech national hymn to St. Wenceslas and his distress at the current events in the harsh and rigid writing. A work for such small forces can’t build up very far; on the other hand, it would be feasible to muster the performers in dicey political conditions. Wosner and oboist James Austin Smith gave the piece the firm emphasis it requires.

The other two works by Holocaust victims date from cheerier pre-Nazi times. They let the listener remember the happier moods of those days and to grieve the loss when these voices were silenced.

Erwin Schulhoff was the most distinguished of the victimized composers. His Divertissement for oboe, clarinet and bassoon dates from 1927 and is full of the cabaret sound of the 1920s. It has dance movements in a rough modernist style, sudden jokey splats and echoes of the then new music of Alban Berg and Bela Bartok. Clarinetist Alan R. Kay, who got a few klezmer touches, and bassoonist Marc Goldberg, who held the dance rhythms, joined Smith in this delightful and witty work.

Leo Smit was a Dutch composer living in Paris and much influenced by the work of his friend Francis Poulenc. His brief Sextet for piano and wind quintet (1933) is as light and jocular as Poulenc’s music. It’s somewhat choppy but the instruments hang together well. Here, all of the previous players were together on stage along with an additional performer to make the wind quintet, hornist David Byrd-Marrow.

The concert concluded with an additional piece with a connection to the Nazi occupation though it was written in 1888 and its composer was long deceased by Nazi times. Ludwig Thuille’s Sextet in B-flat Major, Op. 6, for piano and wind quintet has a charming gavotte for a scherzo but is otherwise an unexceptional workaday composition. Its significance is as the last work played in concert by Martin Goldsmith’s father, Gunther Goldschmidt, a flutist with the Jewish Kulturbund, before he fled Germany in the summer of 1941. The Kulturbund was a ghetto performing federation put up by the Nazis after they fired Jews from all the regular German arts groups, enabling the persecuted Jews to still pretend they had a cultural life. It was disbanded as the Holocaust was brought under way, soon after Gunther fled.

A film dramatization of Martin’s conversations with his father, titled “Winter Journey,” with the famed Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as Gunther, was shown at Menlo on Saturday afternoon as a prelude to the concert. Gunther talks about joining the Kulturbund, despite its Nazi associations, because he just wanted the opportunity to play music and to earn a living. But after his father and brother were trapped in the Holocaust, while Gunther himself and his wife escaped to America (where Martin was later born), grief and guilt made him put down the flute and never play again.

With that solemn thought in mind, the audience left Thuille’s sextet and returned to the modern world. Music@Menlo is gearing up for its next event, its big annual three-week summer festival beginning on July 14. Tickets are now available for its Beethoven string quartet cycle and its survey of the history of chamber music.