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A superb DVD from Anne Sofie Von Otter and others

Last night our music friends arrived again and I prepared an unusual music feast for them.

First up we looked at two DVDs:
1. SAVED by MUSIC - The Wallifisch Family follows the incredible life of Anita Wallfisch and traces the musical inheritance of her cellist son Raphael, his wife Elizabeth, a specialist in baroque and classical violin, and their sons Simon, a tenor and Benjamin, a conductor.
2. REFUGE IN MUSIC - The film tells the story of two extraordinary musicians, classical pianist Alice Herz-Sommer and jazz musician Coco Schumann who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and whose performances there brought comfort and hope to so many. The film also features live performances by Anne Sofie von Otter, Christian Gerhaher, Bengt Forsberg, Bebe Risenfors and Daniel Hope.
NOTE: This is different to the recently released CD of Terizin|Theresienstadt Von Otter songs although many do feature in the DVD.

Sobering stuff you might think and yes, it was to some extent, but at the same time it was inspiring.

The Wallifisch Family DVD related just how musically inspired this family is and has one wondering just how much music talent was destroyed by the Nazis.

But the Theresienstadt DVD was magnificent with very moving music and other portrayals. Anne Sofie Von Otter was superb from all points of view - lovely to look at and very expressive in her lovely animated singing. I often feel the words of songs are somewhat banal but that was far from our thoughts last night. One sensed and was touched by the pathos of the music and the words Sofie sung.

Both our friends and us were very touched by this DVD and recommend it highly.

I prepared some background material for the two DVDs gleaned from the net so will append it here for anyone interested.

John

SAVED BY MUSIC

After her parents were shot by the Nazis, the cellist Anita Wallfisch survived the Holocaust by playing in the Auschwitz women's camp orchestra, allowing sufficient privileges for her to escape the gas chambers. Today, her children and grandchildren are all gifted musicians, achieving fame and renown in their chosen fields. This moving family story combines, and contrasts, their success stories and musical lives with Anita's descriptions of her life in the camp and in Berlin in the 1930's.
Music was the difference between life and death for cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. If fellow-inmate Alma Rose had not recruited her to join the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, she would have perished in the camp. Thankfully Alma, who was the niece of Gustav Mahler and a famed violinist, needed a cello player.

Nazis spared some who had special skills

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch remembers the day she was saved from certain death because she played the cello. It was 1943. She had just arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp - where the Nazis ultimately killed about 1.5 million people - and was receiving the tattooed number on her arm that would be her new identity. The tattoo artist, another prisoner, whispered to her, "What do you know how to do?" He knew those with special skills were sometimes spared from the gas chambers and the ubiquitous chimneys spewing ashes. Anita knew it was hopeless. The teenager answered, "What do I know how to do? I just play the cello."

The Holocaust survivor will tell her story and celebrate the musical legacy she passed on to her son and grandsons in a concert today at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. The event is part of "Women and the Holocaust," sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Humanity at Hebrew Union College. Lasker-Wallfisch survived because she joined the Auschwitz women's orchestra, conducted by fellow-inmate Alma Rose.

"Although my head was shaved and I had a number on my arm, I had not lost my identity totally. ... I was the 'cellist,' " writes Lasker-Wallfisch in her memoir, Inherit the Truth .

Music her refuge

Music, she says by phone from London where she lives with her pianist husband, Peter Wallfisch, "saved my life. It was a refuge. You could imagine that you weren't where you were."

The conductor, Rose, a famed violinist and niece of composer Gustav Mahler, had risen to unprecedented stature within the camp for her women's orchestra (depicted in singer Fania Fenelon's memoir and 1980 television movie Playing for Time, starring Vanessa Redgrave). It turned out, Rose needed a cello - one of the lower strings - for her ragtag group.
Lasker-Wallfisch is unhappy with portrayals of Rose as a cruel taskmaster. She died in the camp in 1944. "The absolute truth was that she was an extraordinary person, a very dignified person, much older than us, and she treated us just like a headmistress," she says. "We weren't always very pleased with her, but it's interesting that all of us, now, are very grateful to her. She saved our lives, really."

Playing for 'Angel of Death'

The orchestra offered them hope. Their main task was to play for the thousands of prisoners who marched through the main gate on their way to work each morning and evening. It was absurd, surreal, frightening - "and it was a lifesaver at the same time," she says. They also gave concerts on Sundays, and played on demand for any SS officer who might desire music. That is how she came to play Schumann's Traumerei for the infamous doctor of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, nicknamed the "Angel of Death." "That was nothing special," she says. "They used to come into the block, and ask to hear this or that, and we just played it."

Lasker-Wallfisch was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Breslau, Germany, the youngest of three daughters. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother was cultured, beautiful and played violin.In her memoir, Lasker-Wallfisch mentions several ironic coincidences that run through her life. One involves Henry Meyer, the Cincinnati violinist who survived the Holocaust to become violinist in the renowned LaSalle Quartet.
Born in Dresden, Germany, Meyer was a child prodigy, who performed as soloist with the Kulturbund Orchestra in 1937 in Breslau. Lasker-Wallfisch played in that orchestra, which was created for Jewish musicians when Hitler took power. During World War II, Meyer was in the men's orchestra at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The two musicians' paths never crossed.

"Henry Meyer seems to go through my life in a funny sort of way," says Lasker-Wallfisch, who re-established ties with him after the war. After her experience in Rose's orchestra, Lasker-Wallfisch, and her sister Renate, who also survived, were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated in 1945. In 1946, Lasker-Wallfisch immigrated to England, where all three sisters were reunited. Their parents and grandmother, who had been deported in 1942, were never heard from again.

"I just had one thought only in my mind, that was to become a cellist and to study and to be normal. To catch up with eight years that were stolen from me," she says. In 1949, she became a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra. Her son, Raphael Wallfisch, is a professional cellist, and her grandson, Simon, will perform on the cello in today's concert.

Story for her children

Lasker-Wallfisch decided to tell her story after helping to narrate a documentary about the camps in 1985. When she took her children to the preview, they said, "You never told us about this." "So I said, OK I'll try and write something down," she says. "It was so long after the event, it was like putting a film backwards. I really wrote this for my children. It was only by accident that it became my book."

She hopes that people will not forget what happened to her and millions of others at the hands of the Nazi regime. "We should not forget, and we should be worthy of being called human beings and be a dignified person," she says.


REFUGE in MUSIC

British violinist and dedicated musical activist Daniel Hope has long championed the music of Jewish composers whose lives and careers were cut short by the Nazis. His most recent project comes to fruition on October 25 with the international release, followed by the U.S. release on November 19, of Refuge in Music, a new Deutsche Grammophon DVD-documentary.

Almost 75 years to the day after “Kristallnacht” launched a new and deadly phase of the Holocaust on November 9, 1938, Refuge in Music pays tribute to the musicians interned in the concentration camp Terezín (aka Theresienstadt), with documentary including the violinist’s own interviews with camp survivors, intercut with live concert footage of chamber music composed at Terezín and similar camps, performed by Hope, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, baritone Christian Gerhaher, pianist Bengt Forsberg, and accordionist, bassist and guitarist Bebe Risenfors.

The violinist, whose own relatives were forced to flee Nazi Berlin, recognized the vital importance of producingRefuge in Music while there were still survivors alive to tell their stories themselves. As he explains,

“The film tells the story of two extraordinary musicians, classical pianist Alice Herz-Sommer (109) and jazz musician Coco Schumann (89) who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and whose performances there brought comfort and hope to so many. All artists in this film appeared without a fee, and all artist royalties will be donated to charity. We are indebted to Katja Schaefer and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts for making this project possible.”

Filmed in Terezín and at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in March 2012, the concert footage features Hope in Erwin Schulhoff’s Sonata for violin and piano and Solo Sonata, and Robert Dauber’s Serenade for violin and piano; the violinist also joins von Otter in a selection of songs composed in Terezín. This is repertoire with which these musicians have already toured throughout the U.S. and Europe; at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the New York Times admired their “fascinating, deeply moving program,” and pronounced their performance “superb.”


The ensemble released a similar program on Terezín/Theresienstadt back in 2007, a DG CD that won France’s coveted Diapason d’Or prize. According to The Guardian (UK), “This hugely important disc…adds immeasurably to our understanding of the remarkable artistic flowering within the camp,” while Hope’s account of the Schulhoff Sonata is “impossible to get through without tears, and completely unforgettable.” Similarly, the New York Times praised the violinist’s “intense performance,” and the way “the frenzied dissonance of the earthy opening movement contrasts with the pathos of the ensuing Andante, played here with soulful eloquence.” An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist since 2007, Hope has won a Classical BRIT Award, the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, and six ECHO Klassik Prizes, besides being nominated for five Grammy Awards, both as soloist and as a member of the Beaux Arts Trio.
Daniel Hope, violin
Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano
Christian Gerhaher, baritone
Bengt Forsberg, piano
Bebe Risenfors, accordion, bass, and guitar

With Alice Herz-Sommer and Coco Schumann
Subtitles: English/German/French

The violinist Daniel Hope introduces Refuge in Music, this new film on the musicians of Terezín

In 1998, as I was driving home and flipping through the radio channels, a piece of music caught my ear. A string trio. With elements of Bartók , Stravinsky and maybe Janáček? And yet I was pretty sure none of these composers had written for this combination. I pulled over and sat transfixed by the side of the road until the announcer said: “that was a string trio by Gideon Klein”. Who?

I googled Gideon Klein and learned a lot about a place called Theresienstadt (also known by its Czech name as Terezín), a garrison town 60 km north of Prague, the central collection point or ghetto for between 50,000 and 60,000 Czech Jews. Once the Nazis realised that allowing prisoners to provide their own forms of “entertainment” enhanced morale, they began permitting concerts under the title Kameradschaftsabende (Comradeship Evenings). With each transport more musicians, actors, directors and scientists arrived in Theresienstadt. Some were leading talents of the day, like the film director Kurt Gerron and the former conductor of the Royal Copenhagen Orchestra, Peter Deutsch.
Gideon Klein was just 21 when he arrived at the camp. A brilliant pianist studying in Prague, he was set to accept a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music when war intervened. In Terezín Klein was a driving force, urging his older colleagues, many of whom had given up on life, to go back to music. His String Trio, the work I heard that night on the radio, was completed nine days before his transport to Auschwitz. But it is far removed from tearful sentimentality. With a distinct affinity to Alban Berg and echoes of the acerbic rhythms of Janáček and Moravian folk songs, he made something entirely his own. What I soon realised was that the Nazis had all but wiped out an entire sound-world from 20th-century music.

In September 2001, I went into the recording studio with the violist Philip Dukes and the cellist Paul Watkins. We were recording a work by Erwin Schulhoff (whose father was sent to Terezín but who was murdered in a different camp). It was also the day al-Qaeda decided to attack America. We emerged from 12 hours of recording this music in the secluded Welsh countryside to find a world changed forever. Five years later, I bumped into the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter in the lobby of a Munich hotel. We got talking. She told me that her father, a high-ranking Swedish diplomat in Berlin in the 1940s, had shared a train journey with an SS officer, Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein had described to Von Otter Senior in frightening detail the horrors of the death camps and urged him to inform his government. The diplomat complied, and the Swedes duly ignored him.
Anne Sofie explained that she wanted to make a CD for Deutsche Grammophon of both the classical and the cabaret songs composed in Terezín, knowing that her father – who never really forgave himself for not being able to do more - would have wanted this too. She had asked the baritone Christian Gerhaher to join the production and asked me to come on board too. When the CD was released in 2007 we toured the project from Carnegie Hall to the Concertgebouw. At every performance we met survivors who shared with us stories of the unspeakable conditions in camps like Terezín. From the first transport of 342 young men which arrived in Terezín on 24 November 1941, the numbers grew to 58,491 by 18 September 1942. In its four-year history, Theresienstadt saw a total of 139,654 prisoners, of whom 33,419 died there, and 86,934 were deported to various concentration camps. Some 14,000 children were murdered.

After one of our concerts in Coburg, Germany, the director of the Lied & Lyrik Festival, Katja Schaefer, asked me what I’d like to do next with the project. When I told her I wanted to make a film, she asked me to call her if ever I got the idea off the ground.

In the mean time I had begun to research my own family history. I discovered that Albert Speer and Joachim von Ribbentrop had personally appropriated the villa in Berlin where my great-grandparents had lived. After my family fled Germany in 1936, the house became a temporary refuge for the Jüdische Waldschule (Jewish Forest School) under Lotte Kaliski. Up to 320 children studied there until its closure in 1939. One of the pupils was film director Mike Nichols. Thereafter, von Ribbentrop installed the Nazis' main decoding station in the villa, which became a sort of German Bletchley Park. The house is today still owned by the German Foreign Ministry.

What fascinates me about Berlin are the histories buried in its buildings. And so I decided some years ago to fill these places with music, one after the other, by performing at the Reichstag, Tempelhof Airport and the Ministry of Finance (formerly Göring’s Ministry of Aviation). It was at this last concert that I met the amazing Coco Schumann, jazz musician extraordinaire. Coco was the King of Swing in the Berlin nightclubs of the 1930s, until he was sent to Terezín. There he joined the so-called “Ghetto Swingers”, performing every night. Later he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was ordered to play popular songs as prisoners were marched to their deaths.

Coco, now 89, is one of those incredible forces of nature. “I’m not a prisoner who played music,” he told me straight: “I’m a musician - who just happened to find himself in a camp.”

“If I could get a film together, would you take me back to Terezín?”, I asked him one evening.
“Sure, as long as drinks are on you!” he replied.
Next I called Katja Schaefer. Thanks to her vision and the financial support of her organisation, the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, we made the film. All artists appeared without a fee, and any artist royalties will go to charity.

I needed to find the right classical musician for the film too. I made enquiries and found out that the pianist, Alice Herz-Sommer, now 109, lived in London. She gave over 100 concerts in Terezín and knew all of the composers whose music I have studied over the last 15 years. Soon enough I found myself in her flat, listening to a lady who once met Kafka and played for Schnabel.

“The audience was old, terribly ill and at the end of their lives. But in spite of that they came,” she told me. “These concerts were the only thing they lived for. For us performers it was heavenly. To know that you’d be playing such great music every evening, it was like a word spoken in God’s presence” - and she gave me a beady look - “in whom I DON’T believe”.
On 10 November the city of Berlin marked the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht with a special concert for 12,000 people in front of the Brandenburg Gate , an historic symbol in a city once divided. I played music of the “degenerate” composers from the 1930s. Images of musicians, including Coco Schumann and Alice Herz-Sommer, together with artists, citizens and victims of those dark times were projected onto the pillars of the Brandenburg Gate.

Beforehand I asked Coco how that would make him feel, seeing himself on the Brandenburg Gate. He simply shrugged his shoulders.
“I was born a musician. I’m just grateful to music for saving me from hell…”

What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our personal tastes and preferences.


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Topic - A superb DVD from Anne Sofie Von Otter and others - John C. - Aussie 18:32:21 09/15/14 (1)

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