NOSPR / Lawrence Foster / Karolina Sikora / Yamen Saadi - NOSPR

‘I never saw a butterfly again. Butterflies don’t live here in the ghetto’ – thus wrote Pavel Friedmann, one of the 15,000 children who were taken to Terezin concentration camp and never returned home. When writing The Song of Terezin,Franz Waxman drew on the poems, drawings and watercolours in which those children expressed their fear, longing for home, craving for freedom and fleeting moments of delight. The path of the NOSPR’s June concert was determined by opposition to injustice, anger and hatred among people of different nations, races and religions. It will lead from the composition by the Chorzów-born Waxman, through scenes from the life of the Hasids, whose dances, songs and ecstatic prayers fascinated Ernest Bloch, to Hymn, Op. 96, a paraphrase of a Catholic psalms set by Felix Mendelssohn, a protestant of Jewish roots, articulating Lawrence Foster’s credo of mutual understanding and tolerance in every domain.

Duration of the concert (including break): approx. 95 minutes