Renee Golabek-Kaye, 52; Pianist Performed With Sister, Mona
Hyfler/Rosner
July 5, 2006 Wednesday
Renee Golabek-Kaye, 52; Pianist Performed With Sister, Mona
Renee Denise Golabek-Kaye, 52, a concert pianist who was
coached from an early age by her mother, the late concert
pianist Lisa Jura Golabek, died June 12. Her family did not
disclose where she died.
Golabek-Kaye earned a master's degree at the Juilliard
School and made her performance debut at the age of 18.
Through her career, she performed at a number of fundraising
concerts benefiting Jewish causes.
She and her sister, concert pianist Mona Golabek often
performed together, appearing at the Hollywood Bowl, the
John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and other major
halls. They also recorded several works, including Maurice
Ravel's "Mother Goose Suite" and Francis Poulenc's "Babar
the Elephant," narrated by Meryl Streep.
In 1999 the sisters performed at the 60th reunion of the
Kindertransport, in London, honoring the European Jewish
children who were transported to safety by train from Nazi
Germany and German-occupied territories prior to the start
of World War II.
Both of Golabek-Kaye's parents lost their families in the
Holocaust. Her father, Michael Golabek, was a member of the
French Resistance and was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
pfeiff...@yahoo.fr
> Los Angeles Times
> July 5, 2006 Wednesday
>
> Renee Golabek-Kaye, 52; Pianist Performed With Sister, Mona ...
I saw this in today's LA Times, at
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-passings5.5jul05,0,411854.story
While her sister Mona is well known (see the article below from the NY
Times and the transcript of an NPR radio program) a Web search and a
newspaper archive search show very little about Renee, and the one or
two photos that appeared in publicity and ethnic newspapers have been
deleted.
The secrecy (or privacy) continues after her untimely passing.
-------
The New York Times
August 25, 2002 pAR26(N) pAR26(L) col 1
Recipe for romance: The night, the music, and Mona. ("The Romantic
Hours" radio broadcast from Los Angeles). Andy Meisler.
MONA GOLABEK can't stand David Letterman. "The Red Shoes," on the other
hand, is one of her all-time favorite movies.
These things should not come as a surprise to loyal fans of "The
Romantic Hours," an aggressively unironic weekly radio program created
and presided over by Ms. Golabek that combines classical music and the
written word. Rather than simply playing and talking about classical
selections, she creates themed hours in which she seeks to amplify the
emotional aspects of the music by incorporating poetry, love letters
and other writings. Along the way she has attracted a cult following,
and a few vocal detractors.
"I've tried to create something in my own little small way through this
radio broadcast," Ms. Golabek, a striking woman in her mid-40's, said
over lunch recently in a Westwood Boulevard restaurant. "So that when
you tune in late at night for one hour, you are not alone -- and
somehow, when you hear the words and you hear the music, for a moment
you just feel connected to a kind of global universality of the passion
of art."
This passion is instantly audible to her listeners, 50,000 of whom, she
says, have written her since the show had its premiere in 1998. Most
express their gratitude, and more than a few have proposed liaisons or
marriage -- particularly after episodes of "The Romantic Hours" focused
on her favorite 19th-century musicians and their famously complex and
tortured love lives.
In the hour titled "George Sand and Frederic Chopin," for example, Ms.
Golabek traced the relationship between that fiery novelist and her
doomed-genius soul mate. In her slightly husky mezzo -- somehow warm
and cultured, sensuous and serious at the same time -- she read from
Sand's diary:
"There is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved. My heart
and body have been bruised and broken by grief. I have suffered often;
sometimes I have deceived myself, but I have loved!" She reads this
over an excerpt from Sibelius's Sixth Symphony. Chopin's Nocturne in D
flat follows.
For "The Love Between Marie d'Agoult and Franz Liszt," Ms. Golabek
quoted liberally from a series of letters between Liszt and his married
lover. "Forgive me, Marie," she read with appropriate desperation. "I
will die if I do not see you. I think I am losing my mind. Peace I
cannot find. In this state maybe I am because of you." Afterward:
Liszt's Consolation No. 3, played by Vladimir Horowitz.
"The Romantic Hours" is financed by Steinway (Ms. Golabek, an
accomplished concert pianist, plays Steinways and does promotional work
for the company) and the XM Satellite Radio service, which runs the
show on one of its classical channels. It is heard on approximately 50
public and commercial stations, usually on Saturday or Sunday evenings.
In the New York area it runs at midnight Saturday on WQXR-FM (96.3),
the classical music station owned by The New York Times Company.
During each show a half-dozen or so readings are sandwiched between, or
combined with, 3- to 15-minute classical selections; Ms. Golabek or one
of her guests often talks over 30 to 45 seconds of the music. When a
single composer's life is chronicled, the hour will be taken up
predominantly, but not exclusively, by his compositions. The show's
producer, a former classical music radio personality and sometime
composer named Doug Ordunio, slipped works by Sibelius into both the
Chopin and Liszt episodes.
"The Romantic Hours" also broadcasts episodes arranged around themes
like the American Civil War (excerpts from letters, to home and to the
front, with musical selections from Ives, Schuman and Thomson), the
life of Oscar Wilde (his writings with works by Chopin, Faure,
Shostakovich) and ancient Egyptian poetry (Verdi, Satie, Ravel). There
have been programs featuring musical guests -- including Philip Glass,
Eugenia Zukerman and Van Cliburn -- reading their favorite poems;
others are devoted to Ms. Golabek reading requests and original poems
and letters sent in by listeners.
Most surprising -- and sometimes annoying -- to habitual classical
radio listeners is the fact that the musical selections are not
identified until the last minute of the show. "I don't want to break
the mood," Ms. Golabek said.
Peter Newman, manager of the commercial classical station KING-FM
(98.1) in Seattle, which has carried the program since its inception,
said: "I think it's a very compelling program that treats the music in
a very different, very fresh way. It's an accessible approach to
classical music that doesn't trivialize it while adding an additional
layer of emotion. This draws in new listeners, especially in this time
of decreasing music education and the marginalization of classical
music."
Mr. Newman, like other station managers who program the show, concedes
that he receives occasional complaints from listeners about what they
see as Ms. Golabek's imposition of her vision.
Indeed, "The Romantic Hours" has its passionate opponents. "I think the
words insult the music," said Alan Rich, a veteran classical music
critic who is a columnist for L.A. Weekly. "She's using music in ways
it wasn't intended to be used and doesn't have to be used. Why can't
she trust people to appreciate the music as it was originally composed?
I'm not overly purist, but I don't think you have to promote music by
kibbling it into small, sweetened, digestible bits."
To this Ms. Golabek responds that some people, unfortunately, seem to
be embarrassed by the emotions that great music releases.
Ms. Golabek is a third-generation concert pianist. She was taught in
large part by her Austrian-born mother, Lisa Jura, who herself was
taught by Ms. Golabek's grandmother Malka. In 1938, Malka Jura and her
husband, Abraham, saved their 14-year-old daughter Lisa by placing her,
alone, on one of the last Kindertransport trains rescuing Jewish
children from Nazi-occupied territory.
Lisa Jura continued her musical studies as a refugee in wartime London.
After coming to the United States in 1949, she learned that her parents
had died in Auschwitz. (Ms. Golabek tells the story in a new book
titled "The Children of Willesden Lane," written with Lee Cohen and
published by Warner Books.)
In New York, Lisa Jura married Michel Golabek, a Polish-born former
French resistance fighter; Mona was born in Los Angeles. In 1979, Mona,
who completed her musical education by studying privately in Rome and
London, won an Avery Fisher Recital Award. "She's a terrific pianist,"
Mr. Rich said, ruefully. "She should be going around the world,
playing."
For nearly 15 years Ms. Golabek did just that, until, exhausted by
touring, she began looking for other ways to express herself. During a
promotional visit to a Los Angeles classical station then called KKGO,
she confided to her interviewer that she "had a fantasy of becoming a
voice at night on radio telling stories."
Invited to try, she developed the show, which had a six-month trial
period at the station now known as KMZT-FM (105.1) before going into
syndication. Nine months ago, the syndication was taken over by WQXR,
which pays Ms. Golabek a salary and is looking for a way to expand her
"franchise," possibly as a multimedia touring performance or as a
television series.
Which might make Ms. Golabek more famous but also change the tenor of
her e-mail. For instance, after sending a form reply to an appreciative
listener recently, she found a missive in her computer in-box that
read, in part:
"I carefully opened this e-mail, wondering how that soft voice I hear
on the computer speakers which seems to go direct to the innermost
parts of my body will sound on an e-mail. There was a flow of noise,
crackly noise coming from the speakers and I was left with faded black
characters strung together. . . . My eyes read the words, but my body
was poised waiting for the sound of your voice."
Shortly afterward, Ms. Golabek recorded thelistener's e-mail message
for broadcast, nestled in the middle of the second movement of
Cherubini's String Quartet No. 3 in D minor.
----
0:00-11:00 AM , This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee
Montagne.
As World War II loomed, thousands of Jewish children were evacuated
from Europe in what became known as the Kindertransport.
Fourteen-year-old Lisa Jura was on one of those trains. Now her
daughter has written a story of how her mother formed a new family in
London with other young refugees and got them through the darkest days
of war with music. Her book is called "The Children of Willesden Lane."
Concert pianist Mona Golabek sat at the piano to tell her mother's
story, where it begins, while Lisa is still safe at home with her
mother Malka in Austria.
Ms. MONA GOLABEK ("The Children of Willesden Lane"): Every Sunday was
her wonderful day, her day to go to her piano lesson. It was the most
important hour of the week for her. And she would take the tram down.
She had the same recurring daydream all the time, that she'd be
striding across the Philharmonic stage, you know, in the great concert
hall. She'd sit down at the great Steinway piano. She'd straighten her
posture. The audience, everybody became hushed, and then the Greek
piano concerto would begin with her great heroic chords and I'd love to
give you a little taste of that.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. GOLABEK: Always in the same place, the dream would stop. She'd get
off, go in to the square and start her piano lesson, but as the story
begins, on this particular Sunday, that was when, of course, she knew
and faced the impending darkness that was going to take over her life.
MONTAGNE: She was, of course, in the Vienna of Adolf Hitler and the
trolley she took eventually ended up with a sign saying, `No Jews, no
dogs.'
Ms. GOLABEK: That's right.
MONTAGNE: There was no escape. Nobody was being allowed out of Vienna
except some children who were put on this Kindertransport.
Ms. GOLABEK: Right.
MONTAGNE: You write that your mother--she couldn't carry anything with
her on the train except a small little bag, but as she ran out of the
house, she grabbed a sheet of music.
Ms. GOLABEK: Yes, it's a poignant moment where she scans the walls. She
looks around. She wants to remember everything. She even says to my
grandmother, `Promise me that you'll never change anything so that I
can think about it,' and then she guiltily grabs a copy of the "Clare
de Lune" by Debussy.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. GOLABEK: Malka, when she taught her, the main thing for her was to
paint an image or a picture in Lisa's mind to inspire her about the
music. So very often when she talked about "Clair de Lune," she'd try
to say, `Imagine a beautiful desert island that we're on. The sea is
reflecting the brilliance of the moon.' That caused my mother to have a
total image of how to paint the tapestry at the piano. It inflamed and
pierced her imagination and into her heart.
MONTAGNE: Lisa, your mother, she made it to London.
Ms. GOLABEK: When she arrived in London, and, of course, she went
through quite a journey and was abandoned by the uncle that never was
able to take her in, eventually ended up outside of Brighton where she
became a kitchen maid and worked for the lady of a place called Peacock
Manor(ph) and was bone tired, never allowed to go to the piano that was
on the second floor there to practice because she, of course, was just
a hired hand really into that place. In a particularly poignant scene
that she told me about, on a Sunday when everyone went to church, she
stayed behind and she crept down to where that piano was. She lifted up
the lid, but she was so frightened to play the piano that she could
only pretend to play it above the keys. So she heard the music in her
mind and started to play a Chopin prelude that I love very much.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. GOLABEK: And as she was playing this, she remembered what her
mother's words were to her when she said goodbye to her at the train
station and the promise that she made to her mother to hold on to her
music because it would be her best friend in life.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. GOLABEK: So as she kept playing that prelude in her mind's eye, she
knew that she had to leave this manor, even though she had food and she
was safe, and make something of her life. And in a very dramatic moment
in the story, she leaves this manor and gets on a bike and rides nearly
80 miles back to a Brighton train station, hops on, brings herself back
to London to the Bloomsbury house and basically begs the Quaker British
Christian who was running the Bloomsbury Organization to give her a
chance in life to make something of her life, and that's how she found
herself being brought to 243 Willesden Lane.
MONTAGNE: And it was very hard for her. I mean, she was in London
during the Blitz.
Ms. GOLABEK: Yes. Very often when I've told this story or shared it,
many people go to the moments during the Blitz, and what my mother told
me when she would put me to sleep at night was how she would go down
into the basement of this orphanage that she eventually arrived at and
would practice as the bombs were falling. And very often, because she
was so frightened about the bombs and the power of it, she would play
the loudest music she could think of in order to drown out the sound of
the bombs, and very often, that was the cadenza of the Greek piano
concerto(ph), which would ultimately build to these very powerful
chords. And it was the same theme built on the opening scene of her
fantasy when she would be on that lumbering street corner.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. GOLABEK: When I started to interview all the remaining kids that
were alive as I put the story together, everyone spoke to me of the
dramatic moment when they first heard my mother playing the piano at
the orphanage at 243 Willesden Lane, because what happened was that
each kid had to get a job and my mom got a job in the east end of
London in the factories there. And one day she came home and she knew
that there was this piano, of course, in the hostel but had not had the
courage to, you know, go over, but she said she had to do it. So she
got up and she walked over, lifted up the lid, and she picked out again
that same piece...
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. GOLABEK: ...and began to lose herself in the emotion and the power
of the music, and I'm told that one by one, as the kids started to come
home from their jobs and the nuns that were living next door at I think
256 Willesden Lane stopped working in the garden, everyone began to
listen to her, and ultimately in that moment, it was the first aspect
of beauty for these 30 kids that had lost everything, that had all come
on these trains from different parts of Europe, and they all drank in
this beauty for the next set of moments and she became somewhat of a
symbol to them of what they had left behind.
MONTAGNE: The very last words of your book, `She had fulfilled the
promise she'd made to her mother. She had held on to her music.' In
fact, you were the one and your sister--you two were the ones who
became the concert pianists that your mother dreamed about.
Ms. GOLABEK: I think the joke was that we were hardly out of the womb
that we were put on the piano. The passion and the fire that was
inflamed within her, she transferred to us. It was almost preordained
that we would go on to do this because those words were so powerful and
entered our souls. And the dream now, of course, is to bring this book
into school systems across America and that's what we're working on, so
that we can inspire other young people out there to the power of a
legacy, and that even in the darkest times, if you have something to
hold on to, you'll make it through.
MONTAGNE: Mona Golabek wrote "The Children of Willesden Lane" with Lee
Cohen. The Milken Family Foundation this week provided a grant to put
the book in schools nationwide.
It's 11 minutes before the hour.
<end>
Hyfler/Rosner
<pfeiff...@yahoo.fr> wrote in message
While her sister Mona is well known (see the article below
from the NY
Times and the transcript of an NPR radio program) a Web
search and a
newspaper archive search show very little about Renee, and
the one or
two photos that appeared in publicity and ethnic newspapers
have been
deleted.
Thanks for all this. Didn't know a thing about the family.
MGW
> MONTAGNE: She was, of course, in the Vienna of Adolf Hitler and the
> trolley she took eventually ended up with a sign saying, `No Jews, no
> dogs.'
>
> Ms. GOLABEK: That's right.
>
> MONTAGNE: There was no escape. Nobody was being allowed out of Vienna
> except some children who were put on this Kindertransport.
For those of you who haven't seen it, I highly recommend the DVD of
Into the arms of strangers: stories of the Kindertransport. When I
saw it, I was impressed that they made sure to include both those who
had good experiences, forming lifelong bonds with their host families,
and those who ended up in bad situations.
One of the people interviewed for the movie is Lore Segal, whose book
"Other People's Houses" is about her experiences as a Kindertransport
child - I highly recommend it.
--
MGW (Note: my Hotmail address is seldom checked)
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even
when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. - Douglas Hofstadter
Hyfler/Rosner
"MGW" <mgw...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
> For those of you who haven't seen it, I highly recommend
> the DVD of
> Into the arms of strangers: stories of the
> Kindertransport. When I
> saw it, I was impressed that they made sure to include
> both those who
> had good experiences, forming lifelong bonds with their
> host families,
> and those who ended up in bad situations.
>
> One of the people interviewed for the movie is Lore Segal,
> whose book
> "Other People's Houses" is about her experiences as a
> Kindertransport
> child - I highly recommend it.
>
And if you can't find that or My First American, about some
other experiences, then pick up Tell Me a Mitzi for your
child, which I believe has never been out of print.
karlyk...@gmail.com
Sarah Ehrett
>Does anyone know Lisa Jura & Michel's marriage date?
quote in your reply, who do you think cares about Lisa Jura & Michel
whoever they are?
Bryan Styble
BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
A Friend
> > Since you replied to an 11 year old message which you didn't bother to
> > quote in your reply, who do you think cares about Lisa Jura & Michel
> > whoever they are?
>
> someone would know. Excuse me for seeing what I could do for my
> freaking research paper.
It probably would have helped for you to have quoted from the original
post, since not everyone gets here via Google News. In any case:
https://www.preceden.com/timelines/293542-lisa-jura-and-ww-ii
says that their wedding date was November 1 1949. I found a reference
that says they were married in New York City, but other sources say
they were married before they left Europe. (Both could be true, of
course.)
Good luck with your freaking research paper.
Karly
> In article <67283440-05b9-4b22...@googlegroups.com>,
Sarah Ehrett
>> Since you replied to an 11 year old message which you didn't bother to
>> quote in your reply, who do you think cares about Lisa Jura & Michel
>> whoever they are?
>
information on your own. Not much of a research paper if you don't
know how to search on your own sources for the available information.
Sarah Ehrett
<radioacti...@gmail.com> wrote:
>You think you're annoyed by this, Sarah; me, I'm still waiting for my wedding invitation!
>BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
Karly
>
> >> Since you replied to an 11 year old message which you didn't bother to
> >> quote in your reply, who do you think cares about Lisa Jura & Michel
> >> whoever they are?
> >
> >Lisa is the mother of the above mentioned pianist, and I was hoping someone would know. Excuse me for seeing what I could do for my freaking research paper.
>
> Hey, it's not like you might use a search engine to find the
> information on your own. Not much of a research paper if you don't
> know how to search on your own sources for the available information.