On April 20, 2018 at 6.30 p.m., the Warsaw Philharmonic will held a concert commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising "Saved from Oblivion". It will be an opportunity to hear Symphony No. 21 "Kaddish", Op. 152 by Mieczysław Weinberg, dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto's Holocaust victims.
Mieczysław Weinberg spent the first twenty years of his life in Warsaw, before escaping to the USSR when the war broke out. His family remained in Poland and perished in the Shoah. The kindness that Dmitri Shostakovich showed the young pianist and composer allowed the latter to live and create. However, Weinberg gained fame only after his death, when the world began to slowly discover an oeuvre comprising 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets, 7 operas, as well as concertos, cantatas and others. Weinberg completed his Symphony No. 21, Op. 152 in 1991, and dedicated it to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. As it was his own musical prayer for the dead, he called it Kaddish. The piece is written for a grand orchestra and soprano. That latter part, which appears in the final section of the piece, is a very expressive vocalise.
A Survivor from Warsaw is a short piece in which the text is recited by the narrator against the sound of the orchestra and the final prayer sung by a male voice choir. The story describes a scene during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazi Germans (1943), recounted here by one of the victims who miraculously survived. Arnold Schönberg – the leading composer of Modernism – wrote the work in 1947 in the United States, to where he had fled from European antisemitism fourteen years earlier. A Survivor from Warsaw was his tribute to the victims of the Holocaust.
Adagio is the first and only completed movement of Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler. The other four movements have survived in the form of sketches and notes, published in facsimile in 1924. Since then, attempts have been made to “finish” Mahler’s work. The proposition which has gained most recognition was that of the English musicologist Deryck Cooke, first presented in the 1960s and most often performed today. However, such attempts have had serious opponents from the very start, as – regardless of the outcome – they would always remain “fakes”. The orphaned Adagio is a deeply emotional musical statement as an individual piece. The highly subjective nature of the music makes it sound like a personal confession. Adagio seems to be an unfinished story of two dramatically intertwined fates, presented at the very beginning as two musical themes.
The programme will be performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir under the baton of Jacek Kaspszyk, along with Simon Callow – reciting voice, Magdalena Molendowska – soprano.
Information about tickets: http://filharmonia.pl