Recovering Forbidden Voices

Four days of unfamiliar music and talks, it was a marathon, but it was also a memorable experience. From the start, a performance of Hans Krása's Brundibar by the children of Kelburn School, a work that lives in the memory of survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, then Shostakovich's Eights String Quartet, Laurence Scherr's Flame Language, setting of  Nelly Sachs's poem, Jun Bouterey-Ishido's haunting piano piece in memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Erwin Schulhoff's Five Pieces for Sting Quartet. And this was just the beginning. Then we heard Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Cello Sonata, Arnold Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces, a heartbreaking setting of children's poems from Theresienstadt from the collection I Never Saw Another Butterfly by Ellwood Derr, and Shostakovich's moving Third Quartet. We were treated to a talk about Georg Tintner who attained late in life fame for his Bruckner recordings, but who as a young man exerted a great influence on the New Zealand musical scene and we heard some of his music. We had a recital of violin music by Jewish composers on the fringe of modernity, Franz Schreker, Zemlinsky and Korngold, capturing a "World of Yesterday". Anton Killin's Podróze an electroacoustic piece commemorated the journey of the 838 Polish refugees who came during the war to Pahiatua, New Zealand, through Russia and Persia,and a nod towards the modern classics, we heard Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. Then more Nelly Schachs, Laurence' Scherr's setting of Fugitive Footsteps. and also Scherr's piece for solo cello, Elegy and Vision. We had two more pieces written in concentration camps, Messian's Abyss of birds, and Gideon Klein's String Trio. The  musical highlight of the conference was the concert that featured Richard Fuchs's prize-winning choral work, Vom Jüdischen Schiksal, (The Jewish Fate), suppressed by the Nazis and performed for the first time 78 years after its composition, Weinberg's Cello Concerto and the finale form Victor Ullmann's Emperor of Atlantis. On the last day of the conference we were treated to Steve Reich's Different Trains for string quartet and tape. The cherry on the top was the Wellington Youth Orchestra playing Beethoven's Two Romances for violin, and Shostakovich's colossal Eighth Symphony It takes time to come down to earth after such a stimulating conference. The thought that stayed was the sense of tremendous loss, the murder of the four Theresienstadt composers, Krása, Ullmann, Klein,  and Schulhoff, in Auschwitz, all cut off in their prime, the murder of all the children featured in the Never Saw Another Butterfly anthology, but also the loss of the voice of the German musical tradition that Tintner and Fuchs faced in exile. Yet on a positive note, I was tremendously impressed by the skill and insight of the students of the New Zealand School of Music who performed much of this music. Every one of the players, soloists, members of the string quartet and other ensembles, was a complete artist. The standard of playing was so high that any musical institute anywhere in the world would have been proud of such musicians.