NOSPR / Alsop / Sułkowska-Migoń / Jernberg / Motseri / Ślubowska - NOSPR

In 2018, the administration of Donald Trump enacted a 'zero-tolerance' immigration policy under which all undocumented immigrants, including those seeking asylum in the United States, were detained in closed facilities. Children were separated from their parents, some of them younger than five years old. According to a Human Rights Watch report, by 2024, 1,360 children had not been reunited with their families. NO! A Lament for the Innocent by Chaya Czernowin was composed in response to this policy. But as time went on, new reasons for protest emerged – most notably as a consequence of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank. The composer writes that her work expresses the rage that ‘starts deep inside the body and pushes outward […] as if the scream is a creature made of pain, using its limbs to swim upward, from the caves of the body into the open air'. 

Grażyna Bacewicz composed her Violin Concerto No 1 at a time when her primary professional engagement was as a violinist in the Symphony Orchestra of Polish Radio (i.e. Orkiestra Symfoniczna Polskiego Radia, a predecessor first of the WOSPR, when the orchestra was relocated to Katowice after World War II, and then – the NOSPR), conducted by Grzegorz Fitelberg. It was 1937, and the composer was twenty-eight. Her music radiates tranquillity and joy – the qualities that also characterise Symphonia Domestica, composed by Richard Strauss in 1904 as a gift to his wife and children. Together, these works provide a counterbalance to the drama of Chaya Czernowin’s composition, which poses a grave question: Can we permit families to become scapegoats of political force and material gain? 

Adam Suprynowicz