Category Archives: Listening materials

Newcastle is playing an active role in helping to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2017 – a global day of reflection that takes place on Friday January 27th. The City-wide programme spans a month of activities, closing on February 7th, with a number of venues hosting a variety of events including art exhibitions, workshops, lectures, films and music recitals.

Included in the programme is the Brundibár Arts Festival – a wealth of music, spoken word, theatre, education workshops and lectures [30 January – 7 February].

Now in its second year, the Newcastle and Gateshead-based festival aims to curate an annual programme of arts and music events that showcase the ‘little known music’ written during the Holocaust by victims and survivors.

The festival was named after the children’s opera “Brundibár” (meaning Bumblebee), written by Czech composer, Hans Krása.

The opera was performed 55 times by children who were incarcerated at Theresienstadt concentration camp in Terezin (Czechoslovakia). Of the 15,000 children who went through Terezin only 100 survived.  The organisers named the Festival after the opera as a lasting tribute to those children who suffered and perished. www.brundibarartsfestival.com/story.html

The Brundibár Arts Festival venues include Newcastle City Library, Kings Hall, Newcastle University, Sage Gateshead, Caedmon Hall, Gateshead Central Library, Arch 16 Café, Lit & Phil, Alphabetti Theatre and Brunswick Methodist Church.

The Brundibár Arts Festival is supported by Newcastle City Council, the Radcliffe Trust and the Community Foundation.

The Festival has a strong educational focus with workshops taking place at Wyndham Primary School, Kingston Park Primary School, Sir Charles Parsons School, Great North Children’s Hospital and Thomas Bewick School.

The Brundibár Arts Festival is the brainchild of Russian-born Alexandra Raikhlina. The 33-year old, mum-of-one, lives in Jesmond with daughter Avital (aged 3) and her husband Lewis, who works as a patent attorney. She moved to Newcastle from Belgium eight years ago to take up the role of violinist with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, a job that takes her all over the world.

Alexandra moved from Moscow to Brussels with her family when she was only eight-years old. Her parents and sister still live in Brussels; and a small part of her family remain in Russia – an aunt and a cousin.

Alexandra Raikhlina, Artistic Director of The Brundibár Arts Festival, said: “The seed for the festival was planted in my mind a few years ago, after I was asked to perform at the Holocaust Memorial Day in Newcastle.  I was given open choice in the repertoire to perform, and started to research music on the Internet.  I came across loads of absolutely fascinating music that I had never heard or played myself before. All music that had been inspired and born out of the devastation of the Holocaust.

“Even though music is at the heart of the festival, there is so much more for people to experience. We’ve tried to programme a variety of events that reflect the emotions of the Holocaust, through theatre, art, film, education workshops and music. This is a chance to let people, young and old, learn about a part of history that should never be forgotten.

“Today we stand at a crossroad and we need to choose our path carefully. Let’s learn from our mistakes, be proactive in our actions, and read and learn from history. Let’s not say empty sentences like “Never again” and walk away satisfied.

“The Brundibár Arts Festival aims to positively document the astonishing achievement of artist victims of the Holocaust. We cannot bring lives back but we can carry on their work. Through their music, the composers live on.”

Cllr Joyce McCarty, Deputy Leader of Newcastle City Council, said: “Music and the arts are a very emotive way to reflect on a serious subject like The Holocaust.  The Brundibár Arts Festival is unique to Newcastle and Gateshead, and the organisers have programmed an inspiring array of music, theatre, film and speakers that provides people with an opportunity to think about the past but also allows the audience to look towards the future as we aim to learn from the atrocities of genocide.”

The Brundibár Arts Festival is proud to be bringing over Holocaust survivor, Ela Weissberger from America to deliver a number of fascinating talks in the City.   Ela performed 55 times in the original production of “Brundibár”, and she will share the incredible story of her survival with audiences and schools during her visit to Newcastle.

You can see where Ela will be talking by visiting The Brundibár Arts Festival website which provides the event programme, details of workshops and how to purchase ticketswww.brundibarartsfestival.com 

People can also see the full Holocaust Memorial Day programme for January and February programmed in association with the City Council’s Arts Team by visitingwww.newcastle.gov.uk/hmd

[from Worldmusiccentral.org website]

For You the Sun Will Shine is a collaboration between vocalist Shulamit and musicians Frank London on trumpet and Shai Bachar on piano. The three artists perform are songs written by women during the Holocaust (Shoa).

”My greatest aspiration is for this music to live on as beautiful music, to be appreciated as art,” explains Shulamit. “It’s not about fancy melodies or complicated compositions. It’s about connecting with the immediate circumstances of the women who composed it, and it has the power to move people profoundly.”

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[From The Times of Israel]

A sold-out US tour of ‘Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin’ indicates a growing interest in recovering — and reinterpreting — the productions staged by Holocaust victims as prisoners.

BOSTON – It might be hearing the survivors’ haunting voices, singing Yiddish songs recorded after the Holocaust, or maybe it’s listening to romantic songs from the “cabaret” at Westerbork, where Jews awaited weekly transports to death.

With many back-stories to choose from, a new wave of researchers and artists is elevating “music as resistance” to the forefront of Holocaust education. A leading project is the traveling mega-production called “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin,” a memorial concert for the musical prisoners of the Nazi camp Theresienstadt, also known as Terezin, outside Prague.

Launched in 2002, the production hinges on a lavish, full orchestra performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s seminal Requiem, a Roman Catholic funeral mass. It was this complex Latin arrangement that Jewish conductor Raphael Schachter, imprisoned in Theresienstadt, chose to perform with a chorus of 150 fellow prisoners in 1943.

To build their story around the 84-minute Verdi masterpiece, “Defiant Requiem” creators interspersed it with live narration, video testimony from Theresienstadt survivors, and “show” footage shot by Nazis inside the camp. The finished product has been performed more than 30 times around the world, and recently wrapped a coast-to-coast US tour.

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[from the Sydney Morning Herald]

Brundibar is a short, light-hearted opera written for children. But for Jerry Rind, who was involved in one of the first performances in 1943, it was anything but light-hearted. For Rind, now 90, it was a matter of life and death – literally.
Rind was one of tens of thousands of Jews interned in the town of Terezin, in the north of Czechoslovakia, which was used by the Nazis as a collection camp for victims who were to be sent to Auschwitz. With room for 7000 people or so, at its height there were 55,000 crammed into the ghetto. Some 30,000 died of disease and malnutrition.

Rind laboured in a workshop making bunks and coffins, and it was from there that he stole the wood used to build the set for an illicit performance of Brundibar.

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[from The New York Times]

BERLIN — AT various points during shows, the German rapper Kutlu Yurtseven gestures to a bandmate sitting demurely off to the side. That’s the cue for 89-year-old Esther Bejarano, a diminutive woman with a snow-white pixie cut, to jump in with a song. “When will the heavens open up, again, for me?” is one favorite, the refrain of a local carnival tune. “When will they open up?”

It is an unusual pairing. Ms. Bejarano is one of the last surviving members of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, the only all-female ensemble among the many Nazi-run prisoner musical groups in the camp system. Among other duties, the Girls’ Orchestra was responsible for playing the marches that imprisoned women had to keep step to as they went out to work in the morning and, even more cruelly, as they returned, half-dead, at the end of the day.

Five years ago, hoping to reach more young people with her story and her message of tolerance and anti-fascism, Ms. Bejarano teamed up with Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop duo with Turkish and Italian roots. They have released their first album, and have been playing concerts throughout Germany and Europe ever since.

The music combines songs like the poignant Yiddish resistance song, “We’ll Live Forever,” composed in the Nazi-run Jewish ghetto in Vilna just before it was liquidated, with rap passages about current problems like racism that, in Ms. Bejarano’s view, show that the lessons of the Holocaust still need to be learned.

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