Kristallnacht Memorial Concert

Over the last few weeks I have worked on organizing a Kristallnacht Memorial Concert. To have a concert to commemorate Kristallnacht, not speeches, came out of the Recovering Forbidden Voices conference arranged by the NZ School of Music and the Victoria University History and Languages departments. For four days we listened to a wide range of music suppressed at the time. Some of this music was so moving, and performed so brilliantly by students of the School of Music, that I thought that these should be heard again by a different, and wider audience. The concert will mirror recent Jewish history, from Bloch's image of the Jewish schtetl and Mendelssohn's tribute to emancipation, to music by composers who escaped or survived Kristallnacht and ended up in New Zealand, Georg Tintner and Richard Fuchs, a moving memorial music for solo cello by Laurence Scherr, and the heartbreaking song cycle of setting of poems by children from Theresienstadt, I Never Saw another Butterfly, by Ellwood Derr. Details of this concert are on the Holocaust Centre of NZ website: http://holocaustcentre.org.nz/