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Music in Theresienstadt-Terezin 1941-1945 Nash Ensemble/Lionel Friend Wigmore Hall Sunday 20 June at 7.30pm This concert concluded a weekend of events commemorating the artistic triumphs in Terezin during the Nazi horrors. Most of the composers and musicians who kept up their arts in the ghetto were in due course transported to Auschwitz and murdered there. Most poignant and affecting of all perhaps was the exhibition of children's pictures downstairs, with their ages and dates of death appended. Of the music heard the best was, we thought, Schulhoff's Duo (1925), a worthy addition to the slender violin/cello duo repertoire. If an enterprising duo was to persuade a concert management to allow them to play it with, say, the Kodaly and Ravel duos, they could have a great programme and might be able to share the usual fee for a string quartet or chamber group (Gould & Higham please consider?!)... The programme as a whole reflected the musical activity in Terezin, where such as Smetana's Bartered Bride music featured. But the arrangements heard at Wigmore Hall of its Overture, and of Krasa's Brundibar music and Haas' songs were somehow so elaborated by the arrangers and polished in the Nash Ensemble's performance as to distance them from the scene upon which we were gathered to reflect. Hear this concert on BBC R3 5 July. I look forward to adding a link to a review of the whole weekend in due course. Peter Grahame Woolf For an overview of the weekend, see Anne Ozorio's
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