Heights-based chorus presents Holocaust memorial concert

The Choral Arts Society of Cleveland’s 2014–15 season could be titled "a season of anniversaries.” The Cleveland Heights-based community chorus has so far this season performed two concerts celebrating its 40 years of music making. CASC will cap the anniversary year with the Cleveland premiere of British composer James Whitbourn’s Annelies, a choral setting of excerpts from Diary of a Young Girl. This concert will commemorate the death of Anne Frank in a concentration camp 70 years ago, as well as the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Annelies, a Holocaust tribute concert, will take place Sunday, May 31, at 4:00 p.m., at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple in Beachwood. Presented in collaboration with the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and host Fairmount Temple, the performance is supported in part by the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and by the Cyrus Eaton Foundation.

World-class soprano Arianna Zukerman will sing the soprano solo. Zukerman sang the world premiere of the work and recorded the Grammy-nominated piece for Naxos.

The libretto for the oratorio highlights excerpts from the diary written by Annelies Marie Frank from 1942, when she and her family went into hiding from the Gestapo, until August 1944, when the family was betrayed and taken into custody. In the midst of devastation and hopelessness, Frank communicates insights and an equanimity beyond her years. Her diary dramatizes her loves, her hopes and her longings. Whitbourn makes these musings and emotions palpable in the haunting and complex music of his 2005 oratorio that conveys a universal message of hope, resilience and the redemptive power of music.

The concert also honors the six million who died during the Holocaust and the three million Jews and other minorities who survived, but were traumatized, many of whose children carry forth the burden of their parents’ trauma. The musical performance will be preceded at 3 p.m. by a Holocaust education session led by Cantor Sarah J. Sager of Fairmount Temple.

Consideration of the impact on survivors will be reflected in a focus on Betty Gold (1930–2014), one of Cleveland’s most beloved survivors, prominent speaker on behalf of the Maltz Museum, co-author of two books and subject of a documentary film. Audience members will also benefit from program annotation provided by Rabbi Roger Klein, of The Temple Tifereth Israel.

Regarding the significance of this Cleveland premiere, Choral Arts director Martin Kessler, a lifelong Cleveland Heights resident, said, “This choral masterpiece needs to be heard in a music capital such as Cleveland. Although it has been performed at least 30 times all over the world, it has never been done in Northeast Ohio. About the Grammy-nominated recording, Choir and Organ Magazine wrote, ‘Whitbourn’s devastatingly beautiful and restrained treatment of the subject makes it all the more poignant.’ ”           

Both the concert and the pre-concert talk are free and open to the public. For further details about Annelies and information on Sponsorship Patron levels, visit www.choralartscleveland.com.             

Marge Geiger

Marge Geiger is a board member and singer for Choral Arts Society of Cleveland, an English professor at Tri-C East Campus, and a Cleveland Heights resident for 25 years, married to Joe Geiger, retired Heights High English teacher.

Read More on
Volume 8, Issue 5, Posted 6:04 PM, 04.30.2015