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[00:00:00] Don Roth What he discovered was that there was some absolutely amazing music that had been lost and had the Nazi regime not taken place, some of these composers would have been among the biggest stars of the classical music world, the opera world in particular in Europe.

[00:00:25] Soterios Johnson In the 1930s and '40s, the Nazi regime in Germany and elsewhere in Europe banned and destroyed what it deemed degenerate art, modern styles of literature, visual art and music it considered un-German. This spring, UC Davis' Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts hosted a unique program aimed at reviving and restoring the music of composers whose careers and lives were disrupted or worse during those years. The two-day event called "Recovered Voices," featured two concerts of the nearly-lost music. This is The Backdrop, a UC Davis podcast exploring the world of ideas. I'm Soterios Johnson.  Don Roth is executive director of the Mondavi Center and was instrumental in creating the event. Welcome to The Backdrop, Don.

[00:01:07] Don Roth Oh, thanks a lot, Soterios. Glad to be here.

[00:01:10] Soterios Johnson So the Recovered Voices program was a collaboration between UC Davis and the Ziering Conlin Initiative for Recovered Voices at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. Could you talk a little bit about that and how you ended up bringing the program to the Mondavi Center?

[00:01:25] Don Roth Yes. Glad to. I've known James Conlin, who's currently the music director of the Los Angeles Opera, he's been there for 16 or 17 years. And he's had this passion project for almost 30 years of recovering the music of these composers who were suppressed by the Nazi regime. Some of it, as you mentioned, was stylistic. It was about art that they perceived as modern and degenerate. Some of it was art, in fact, that was very accessible and what you might call conservative in its style, but was written by Jewish composers or by composers who were politically against the regime or by composers who were gay. So there were, you know, as we know, the Nazis repressed any number of different people for any number of reasons. In any case, I've known Conlin for over 20 years, so we worked together at the Aspen Music Festival, and I try to get to Los Angeles and hear him cnduct. He's an amazing conductor and as well as speaker. And for when he first came to Los Angeles, he actually recovered a number of operas that had been written by these composers who were repressed by the Nazis. And then recently, as you mentioned, he found a new home for this project at the Colburn Conservatory of Music Institute, which is absolutely an educational treasure for music education on the West Coast. And he was able to land it there with the Ziering Conlin initiative for Recovery of Voices, and he hopes this will become the basis for a long-term, structurally secure effort to bring back this lost music. In any case, during COVID, but back after the opera had started giving performances again. I went down to see an opera, and afterwards I met outside with James because it was still here. It was still times when we couldn't meet backstage and and we, you know, we were through our masks. We we discussed with enthusiasm to find a way for him to bring this project to us. You know, and the advantage of a place like the Mondavi Center is we we're on this amazing campus with all these faculty resources, with all the scholarship, the learning, the teaching that goes on. And so we believed that if we were able to bring the music of the project, we could also surround that with some real contextualizing information that our faculty members would have. So he said, Well, I think I have a way because I'm working with these amazing Colburn students, and I think we could help bring bring them up and do a couple of programs. And so from at that juncture, there was probably about 18 or 20 months ago I went back to the Mondavi Center and, and talked to my colleagues, particularly Jeremy Ganter, the associate executive director, who's also our director of programing. And we just started to roll our sleeves up and deal with the details. And the end product of that was just very recently we were able to have two concerts by what I would say, these absolutely magnificent musicians from Colburn and a wonderful symposium featuring Maestro Conlon as keynote speaker. But several of our great UC Davis faculty who brought new perspectives to the work he was doing.

[00:05:07] Soterios Johnson So when when did when did James Conlon actually start the the Recovered Voices initiative? Like, how did it come about? When did it start? How long has it been working on this?

[00:05:18] Don Roth Well, he tells the story that back about 30 years ago when he was the music director for the city of Cologne in Germany, which meant he oversaw the opera, the symphony, all the musical activity. Subsequently, he moved and ran the Paris Opera for a decade before he came to L.A. where Placido Domingo had brought him in to be their new music director and conductor. So about 30 years ago, he tells the story he was going out as conductors do, on what I call artist time. They're having dinner at 10:30 at night or 11:00 at night after an opera. He's on his way to an Italian restaurant in Cologne, his favorite Italian restaurant. And there on the radio he heard this beautiful piece of music and he you know, he was a he was a bit of a prodigy. He had been conducting since he was in his teens. When he was at Juilliard, he was picked to conduct La Boheme by Maria Callas. You know, he had quite the background. And he hears this music and he says to himself, I've never heard this piece of music. I've been listening to classical music my whole life since I was a little kid. And then it turned out it was a piece, The Mermaid. It was kind of a tone poem by Alexander Zemlinsky, and he said, I just can't or I never heard this music. So he researched it. And it turned out that Zemlinsky, who had been a big, big, important composer star