Music for Holocaust Memorial Day at Magdalen College

Amid the ravages of the Holocaust, in ghettos and camps across occupied Europe, victims responded to the catastrophe that was engulfing them through music.

This year, Magdalen College is marking Holocaust Memorial Day with a concert of music written by composers who were murdered by the Nazis, as well as a piece that commemorates those victims.

The concert will take place in Magdalen’s Grove Theatre, and will be introduced by Professor Shirli Gilbert, author of Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. To perform the music, we are thrilled to welcome the Leonore Piano Trio, who are described by The Strad as combining ‘soaring potency’ with ‘impassioned eloquence’. The Leonore Trio consists of Benjamin Nabarro on violin, Gemma Rosefield on cello, and Tim Horton on piano – all highly celebrated artists. They will be joined by Rachel Roberts on viola.

The programme will consist of:

Hans Krása: Tanec

Hans Krása (1899 –1944) was a Czech composer. He was killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He helped to organize cultural life in Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Tanec dance was composed in 1944 while Krása was in Auschwitz.

Zikmund Schul: Chassidic Dances

Zikmund Schul (1916–1941) was born in Germany and deported to Terezin in 1941. He died there of tuberculosis. He wrote the Chassidic dances in Theresienstadt.

Gideon Klein: String Trio

Gideon Klein (1919–1945) was a Czech pianist, composer and educator. He was murdered at Auschwitz shortly after completing his string trio.

Mikhail Fabianovich Gnessin: To the Memory of Our Dead Children

Gnessin (1883–1957) was a Russian composer. He escaped to Tashkent before the Nazi advance, and wrote this piano trio on learning of the death of his son in 1943.

Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Trio no. 2

Shostakovich’s Trio, written in 1943-44, confront[s] the horrors perpetrated by the retreating German army during the last years of the war, and is noted for its ‘Dance of Death’ in the final movement.

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