(Above: Singer Siri Vik in an earlier concert performed at The Shedd Institute; photo by Paul Carter)
By Daniel Buckwalter
She ushered the audience through French cabaret music popularized in World War II, humanizing composers and performers such as Édith Piaf, Charles Trenet, Django Reinhardt and others.
This music was the backdrop to the fiercely harsh climate in Paris and France generally, then under the thumb of Nazi Germany. From starvation to POW camps to the ever-present possibility of arrest for being gay or running afoul of the Nazis from an artistic perspective, fear was a real part of everyday life.
And only Siri Vik, with her artistic as well as a holistic and humanitarian touch, could convey to the audience the often scary threads of this little-explored music history and its artists and give all of it the credit it deserves.
Boum! Édith Piaf and Songs de la Résistance is an excellent program of 16 songs that is a gem inside The Shedd Institute’s annual overarching Oregon Festival of American Music, this year titled, If Only In My Dreams: America at War, 1939-45.
Vik took the stage at Jaqua Concert Hall to perform these songs in a matinee on Aug. 4, backed by an eight-piece band led by pianist Vicki Brabham. She will sing the program again at 7:30 p.m. on Aug.10, and you will be charmed — and well-educated — if you are able to attend. I highly encourage you to do so.
The songs themselves are not protest songs in the strictest sense, as Vik notes early in the program. Indeed, almost all of the songs were composed before World War II.
These songs, however, took on new meaning for the French public during the war. They were performed by artists who were working in the same restrictive conditions in daily life as everyone else and in an environment where some fellow countrymen were supporting the Germans, and no one could always be certain who was who. Are you the enemy or are you a friend?
The artists, Vik said, “were just trying to survive. Their music gave hope.”
From the opening number — Le Fanion de la Légion, a tribute piece to the French Foreign Légion that was a hit in 1937 — the program has something for everyone. My favorites were Lili Marlene (whose lyrics come from a World War I poem) and the lovely La Vie en Rose.
There is rich history to many of the artists who are featured — Piaf, especially. Vik weaves these back stories throughout the program, and it is a treat to learn more about the artists of this time.
Do hear Vik and her backup band perform Boum! Édith Piaf and Songs de la Résistance when it repeats on Aug. 10 at The Shedd.
