Over the last couple of decades, musicians have been reconstructing the legacy of composers who spent World War II in Terezin (also known by its German name, Theresienstadt), a garrison city near Prague that the Nazis turned into a concentration camp. About 140,000 Jews were sent there, starting in 1941, including an unusually large number of musicians, writers and painters.
The Nazis allowed these artists to create a cultural life and turned it into a propaganda tool. Terezin, as they presented it to visitors from the Red Cross, was a model camp: musicians gave concerts; children painted pictures and wrote poems. But behind that facade, Terezin’s inmates were used as slave labor in local mines and factories, and most — some 88,000 — were eventually sent to Auschwitz and other death camps.
The 92nd Street Y’s Will to Create, Will to Live: The Culture of Terezin, which opened on Tuesday evening, is an expansive monthlong series devoted to the camp, with concerts by the Nash Ensemble, the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and the pianists Russell Ryan and Shai Wosner. It also includes panel discussions, readings, children’s programs, a film screening and an exhibition of posters, photographs, art and artifacts. If not for its subject matter, you would call it a festival.
There’s much more; read the full article.
Will to Create, Will to Live: The Culture of Terezín series continues tonight with the Nash Ensemble at 8pm (listen to music samples), and a sold out screening of The Music of Terezín, the first public screening in North America of his celebrated 1992 documentary film on the music created in Terezín.
Learn more at 92Y.org/Terezin.
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Allan Kozinn, wrote in today’s New York Times: “Winning the Chopin Competition early in his career did not stop the pianist Garrick Ohlsson from insisting on musical challenges from styles and periods outside his specialty...At the moment Mr. Ohlsson has Liszt on his mind, mainly because this season includes the bicentenary of Liszt’s birth, though he has been known to mine the Liszt catalog in nonanniversary years too. In the 1998-99 season he played a three-concert series at Lincoln Center juxtaposing Liszt with Beethoven, Bach and Schubert. In one installment he undertook the draining feat of pairing Liszt’s monumental B minor Sonata with Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. He revisits the sonata next Sunday as part of a Liszt recital at the 92nd Street Y...”
Learn more about Garrick Ohlsson’s 92Y concert on Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 3 pm and about his master class at 92Y on Mon, Apr 16, 2012, 5 pm.
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Join us for an afternoon of free concerts at 92nd Street Y. At 2 pm in the Weill Art Gallery, Luba Poliak will perform works by J. S. Bach, B. Bartok, M. Ravel, R. Schumann and C. Debussy. Ms. Poliak is a 92Y School of Music Faculty member who offers private instruction for adults and children.
Then at 5:30 pm, again in the Weill Art Gallery, School of Music students will perform in the Young Artists in Recital series. We welcome friends, family and the community to attend these concerts which are always free. Hope to see you soon!
Learn more about 92Y School of Music.
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This year, the program is doing a complete about-face in its concept, adapting its contents to a new kind of festival in which, above all, multiculturalism reigns with young up-to-date performers.
Compared to earlier editions, this one has a wide range of artistic visions. The program of the 11th edition is made up of a series of artists who share the common bond of Spanish culture, but who also have developed a divergent style and a different way of understanding flamenco, whether music or dance.
This year, 92nd Street Y will present two amazing programs in partnership with the Flamenco Festival.
Acclaimed flamenco dancer Leilah Broukhim will perform Dejando Huellas (Traces): A Sephardic Woman’s Ancestral Journey in Flamenco Dance on February 25. Created by Ms. Broukhim, this highly personal work is an intimate expression of Ms. Broukhim’s roots, her personal journey and the history of her people.
On March 5, Unterberg Poetry Center will present Words & Music: Federico Garcia Lorca, a poetry recital of Lorca along with the “Canciones Populares” interpreted by Gema Caballero.
Get a head start on the Flamenco Festival on January 14 with Flamenco Ole! – An Interdisciplinary Exploration in Dance, Music, Visual Art, Social Studies and Literacy.
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The acoustic duo Aztec Two-Step has been making amazing music together since 1971. That’s when two individual singer songwriters, Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman, joined forces after meeting in a coffee house in Boston. They took their name from a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem and recorded
the first song ever written about Jack Kerouac’s iconic American novel, On The Road.
“If you cared about the music,” legendary DJ Pete Fornatale said in the documentary above, “you were always on the lookout for that fresh new sound… but that also had the potential to lunch new careers. And I always viewed the debut album by Aztec Two-Step as one of those records.”
To commemorate their 40th anniversary year, 2012 brings the official release of Fowler & Shulman’s studio CD Cause & Effect. Listen here.
And on January 10, join Aztec Two-Step with NY1’s Budd Mishkin at 92nd Street Y for conversation of their extraordinary career and friendship. Use discount code ACOUSTIC to receive 30% off the ticket price!
[Aztec Two Step with Budd Mishkin]
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Did you miss Elliott Carter’s 103rd Birthday Concert at 92nd Street Y earlier this month? Head over to The New York Review of Books Blog to read Charles Rosen’s terrific review, which includes four audio clips from the concert. “Perhaps the flashiest piece on the program,” wrote Rosen, “was Hiyoku, a duet for two clarinets performed with astounding virtuosity by Ayako Oshima and Charles Neidich, which was dazzling and went by like a whirlwind.”
Listen for yourself in the audio player below.
Up next for 92Y Concerts is A Champagne New Year’s Eve with The Knights, on December 31. “Any performance by this vibrant indie orchestra,” wrote The New York Times, “is cause to celebrate.” Read more and purchase tickets, here.
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Dance has always been popular in Israel, but it’s taken different forms. Before independence in 1948, there was fervor among kibbutz artists and new city dwellers to find a way that the people could express their excitement about reviving the land and finding their pride of place. Israeli folk dancing became a signature phenomenon of the new culture and was such fun to perform that it spread internationally.
Today’s worldwide interest in contemporary Israeli dance is in watching it rather than participating. Its performers are astounding for their reckless, highly technical accomplishments: Choreographers are daring and relentless in the ways they capture an ennui, along with the frustration and abandonment of the older generations’ idyllic hopes. Their works are specific to Israel, but speak for many beyond its borders.
[...]
Is there a specific look to Israeli contemporary dance? Not exactly, because so many are creating it, though it’s noteworthy how easily dancers execute difficult technical moves and stops, sometimes perched on one leg with the other raised at an extreme angle, or suddenly drop to the floor backward, or snake their spines in a fluid ripple that might go sideways, or search behind their bodies like antennae. The performers are also acknowledged for their creativity, since many choreographers credit them as “co-creators,” in their printed programs.
Read the full piece here, where she offers a lengthy and enjoyable review of “International Exposure 2011,” the festival of contemporary Israeli dance.
Related, mark your calendars for Jan 6-8, when three nights of choreographed Israeli dance take place at 92nd Street Y, during APAP. Learn more here.
What’s more, Judith Brin Ingber, author/editor of Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, will be at 92nd Street Y on January 15 with Judith Chazin-Bennahum, author of René Blum & The Ballets Russes: In Search of a Lost Life. That’s part of our Will to Create, Will to Live: The Culture of Terezín series. Read more.
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The town of Terezín [pronounced tehr-eh-ZEEN] is located 38 miles northwest of Prague. From 1941 to 1945, it was a transition camp/ghetto that the Nazis used to hold Jews before deporting them to the death camps. The camp is widely known as the “show” camp where the Nazis staged performances by the Jewish internees to create the illusion of normalcy for Red Cross visitors in 1944 and for a propaganda film called The Führer Gives a City to the Jews.
But the Nazis’ use of Terezín as propaganda has obscured its remarkable and inspirational legacy. “The creativity and resourcefulness of those who passed through Terezín is astonishing,” says Hanna Arie-Gaifman, director of 92Y’s Tisch Center for the Arts and a Czech-born, Israeli-raised scholar of comparative literature and music who has been the driving force behind the series. “Despite inhumane conditions and constant deportations to Auschwitz, the internees of Terezín created a flourishing cultural life that would have been exceptional in a real town, never mind a Nazi ghetto.”
More than 2,400 lectures were offered on a wide variety of topics (more than one for each day of the camp’s existence). There were 55 performances of Hans Krása’s children’s opera, Brundibár. Composer Viktor Ullman wrote 20 musical works there, some still unfinished when he perished. The camp had not only orchestral and chamber concerts but a cabaret and a jazz band called “The Ghetto Swingers.” And the library was filled with 60,000 smuggled books. See posters and documents that provide some insight to broad range of performance activity, and a look at the daily life of the people interred in Terezín.
92nd Street Y presents a groundbreaking multidisciplinary series, Will to Create, Will to Live: The Culture of Terezín, from January 9 to February 16 to honor the people who passed through Terezín and explore the remarkable cultural legacy they left behind. The series features more than 20 events and educational programs; five free live webcasts; and one concert available via 92Y’s live satellite broadcast program.
In exploring the range of Terezín life, 92Y’s Will to Create, Will to Live: The Culture of Terezín draws from 92Y’s myriad specialties. The cornerstone of the program is a four-concert series with the Nash Ensemble of London, baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and pianists Shai Wosner and Russell Ryan performing music primarily played and written in Terezín itself.
Listen to music samples that are part of our Terezín concert series and watch video clips from Music of Terezín, directed by Simon Broughton. Broughton will introduce the first public screening in North America of his celebrated 1992 documentary film at 92Y on January 21.
Learn more at 92Y.org/Terezin.
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