[Geraldine Auerbach]

Simon Broughton invites you to the Barbican
Simon Broughton <simon.broughton@btconnect.com>
Music for the End of Tme

Hello Friends
This is an event I’m involved with all day on Sun 23rd Jan at the Barbican. It features music composed in Nazi prison camps and ghettos during WWII. I recommend it very strongly because most of these composers are off the radar because they were exterminated by the Nazis. That might not sound very appealing but I think we owe it to them and much of the music is gorgeous and very powerful. There are four events during the day: 1. An intro and film. 2 An orchestral concert, 3. A chamber and choral concert. 4. The closing finale.

The obvious highlight is session 1, because it’s my intro and the film I made about musicians in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto back in 1993 which I’m very proud of. And the final concert (4) combines two of the most powerful wartime pieces composed in confinement – Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (premiered in Görlitz POW camp), one of the great chamber pieces of the 20th century, and Viktor Ullman’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis, a satirical opera composed in the Terezin ghetto but not performed because it was clearly a satire on Hitler. One of the original singers in interviewed in the film.

I also love the music of Ervin Schulhoff, featured in the orchestral concert (2), who being both Jewish and Communist never even made it to Terezin and died in a German prison camp.

Messiaen is known, basically because he survived. The others aren’t because they were supposed to be written out of history. We need to reverse that. Details here
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/series/bbc-total-immersion-music-for-the-end-of-time

And it would be nice to say hello!

Simon

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