The Nash Ensemble

Programme:
Smetana - From my Homeland for violin and piano
Gideon - Klein String Trio
Pavel - Haas Suite for solo piano
Hans - Krasa Tanec for string trio
Dvorák - Piano Quartet in E flat Op. 87

‘We did not simply sit down by the waters of Babylon and weep, but evinced a desire to produce art that was entirely commensurate with our will to live.’ So said the composer and conductor Viktor Ullmann, a prisoner in the notorious Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis incarcarated virtually the whole of Czechoslovakia’s Jewish cultural elite in Theresienstadt, where they faced starvation and forced labour before being dispatched to Auschwitz. The Nazis used the camp for its greatest propaganda lie, presenting it as a comfortable, protected environment in which inmates performed plays, concerts, cabarets and operas for the benefit of visitors.

One legacy of this grotesque myth is the extraordinarily eloquent and varied work produced by the camp inmates. In a celebration of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity and intolerance, the Nash Ensemble performs works by artists imprisoned in Theresienstadt, alongside pieces by Czechoslovakia’s national composers, Smetana and Dvorák.

Tickets include a glass of wine or soft drink in the banqueting room during the interval.