FR
Britten Sinfonia | Double Concerto
Friday 28 March 2025, 7.30 pmSaffron Hall, Saffron Walden, UK
Bohuslav MARTINŮ: Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano and timpani, H 271
Richard STRAUSS: Metamorphosen
Michael Zev GORDON: A Kind of Haunting (world premiere tour)
Britten Sinfonia
Jonathan Berman (conductor)
Louisa Clein, Allan Corduner (narrators)
James Newby (baritone)
Zoë Beyers (violin/director)
1945: A KIND OF HAUNTING
80 years after the end of WWII, we hear musical responses from then and now.
The tension and anxiety of 1938 is in Martinů’s concerto, written at a time when he had left his native Czechoslovakia for Switzerland. Strauss writes from a different perspective, his 1945 elegy lamenting the destruction of Germany and its culture.
With sung and spoken texts by poet Jacqueline Saphra, scholar Marianne Hirsch and the composer himself, A Kind of Haunting explores why and how the trauma of the Holocaust holds such a grip on not only the children of victims and survivors, but the grandchildren too. Jewish composer Michael Zev Gordon draws on his grandmother’s memoir, which details the final traces of his grandfather’s life before he was shot in a remote Polish forest. Why is there such an interest in re-visiting – or making present – what was lost so many years before?
More information: https://www.brittensinfonia.com/events/1945-a-kind-of-haunting