"Defy Fear Week" wraps up with three days of musical performances this weekend.
The "Defiant Requiem" is a collage built on a remarkable historical incident when internees at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, awaiting deportation to death camps, arranged performances of the Verdi requiem using a single copy of the piano score somehow smuggled into the camp.
The Nazis used Terezin as a showplace, a façade where they could display how well they were treating their prisoners for Red Cross officials and other international observers. At least one performance was given before Nazi officials and their guests and filmed.
Conductor Murry Sidlin interprets these World War II performances as overt acts of defiance, the singers using the cover of classical religious music to shout curses at their oppressors. Among other things, the requiem's text paints a vivid picture of the doom of final judgment that awaits the wicked.
As presented by Sidlin, conducting the Anchorage Concert Chorus and UAA Singers, the upcoming performance intersperses Verdi's music with video from people who survived the camp and old Nazi propaganda films. It ends with an ominous train whistle leading into a Hebrew hymn for peace, which the singers hum as they leave the stage. The orchestra, too goes silent, instrument by instrument, until only a solo violinist is left.
Reviewing a performance with the Choir of Washington, The New York Times described the reaction of the listeners. "With the audience already stunned into silence, the projected request to withhold applause for a moment of silence was almost unnecessary."
In collaboration with the performance of the gigantic requiem, a program of intimate chamber music associated with the Holocaust and World War II will be presented by UAA music faculty. Performers include Armin Abdihodzic, Laura Koenig, Timothy Smith, Lee Wilkins, Mark Wolbers and the Borealis Guitar Quartet.
The program, dubbed "Music of Remembrance," will include a guitar quartet and concerto by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a flute sonata by the Jewish composer Leopold Smit completed only a few days before he was arrested and sent to a death camp and Dmitri Shostakovich's gripping Piano Trio No. 2, composed at the height of the war.
The UAA concert will also feature Olivier Messiaen's remarkable "Quartet for the End of Time" for piano, clarinet, violin and cello. It was written while Messiaen was a prisoner of war, following the fall of France, and premiered outdoors in the rain to an audience of several hundred guards and prisoners. The other performers had also been professional musicians in civilian life. A sympathetic guard obtained paper and pencil for the composer and instruments for the performance.
The quartet became one of the most-discussed works of the 20th century and Messiaen went on to become the most important composer in France, known for his atmospheric sound effects and mystical subject matter.
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THE DEFIANT REQUIEM will be presented at 8 p.m. Friday, April 8, and 4 p.m. Sunday, April 10, in Atwood Concert Hall. Tickets are available at centertix.net.
MUSIC FOR REMEMBRANCE: A DEFIANT REQUIEM COLLABORATION will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 9, in the UAA Fine Arts Building Recital Hall. Tickets are available at uaatix.com.