[Cz-L] Lvov in opera?!

Saturday, November 9 at Strathmore

Read the plot, reverberates with our postings.

A little extra information.

Jan Hamer is my close friend's cousin and a child of survivors. She met Nir and Wagner at a conference.
Later she and Mary approached them and asked their permission to write the libretto.

accidently Jan's parents live at the same retirement community as the conductor's (Gajewski) and they
 introduced the two of them. I thought you would be interested. Can't wait to hear the performance

Lost Childhood Concert Opera
 
 
 

Michael Hendrick (as Judah), tenor

Christopher Trakas (as Manfred), baritone

Piotr Gajewski, conductor

Music by Janice Hamer

Libretto by Mary Azrael

The year is 1939 in Lvov, Poland. In the living room of a well-to-do Jewish family, Julek, 9, and his teenage sister dance the tango to music from the radio. Their father enters and turns to the BBC broadcast to hear news of impending war. Fast forward to 1993, an elegant bar in a Manhattan hotel, where Judah, a psychiatrist (formerly the child Julek), sits across from his German colleague, Manfred, born after the war to a prominent family of Nazi sympathizers.
 
In a gripping confrontation between a post war German and a Jewish Holocaust survivor, each deeply troubled by his own lost childhood, the past comes alive in the present. Through a series of flashbacks, Manfred, tormented, faces his family’s dark past, while Judah reveals for the first time, with bravado and humor, anger and grief, how he, his mother and sister outwitted the Third Reich. With searing emotion and heartwarming lyricism, the music recollects the terrors of the Holocaust and inspires a hopeful vision of the future.
 
Judah is based on Yehuda Nir, a psychiatrist and the author of the memoir The Lost Childhood. The inspiration for Manfred is Nir’s friend Gottfried Wagner, a great-grandson of composer Richard Wagner and a specialist in post-Holocaust dialogue between victims, perpetrators and their descendants.
This performance marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), on November 9-10, 1938, when a series of violent anti-Jewish pogroms occurred throughout Germany and elsewhere.

Channa
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Received on 2013-10-30 07:27:09