Michael Walenciej and Dana School of Music Graduate Student Tim Webb performing Robert Rollin's Lyric Counterpoint on a Theme of Warshawsky

PROGRAM NOTES: Lyric Counterpoint on a Theme of Warshawsky, commissioned and premiered by the Cleveland Duo (Stephen Warner, violin, and Carolyn Gadiel Warner, piano) is a original contrapuntal setting of a folk song by Mark M. Warshawsky (1840-1907). Warshawsky was a touring performer and a klezmer composer the Yiddish Theatre in Russian and Poland. The famous Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem assisted in publication of two collections of Warshawsky's songs in 1901 and 1914.

The song describes a little one-room school house where the children and their teacher gather around the warm hearth as they work on reciting the alphabet. The teacher tells his pupils, "These letters help to accomplish many things in life, but when you grow older you will understand that they also have many tears." The song almost immediately became a rallying point for the Jews when in trouble in the early part of the 20th Century, was sung in the concentration camps of World War II, and in the oppressive days of communist Russia. — Notes by the Composer, Edited by Gwyneth Rollin.