Page 232 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Konstantin Krimmel performs music from incarcerated Jewish composers CREDIT: Wigmore Hall
Buried in history’s vast tragedies are the individual stories that break your heart. In yesterday’s
concerts from the Nash Ensemble, the wonderful small group set up more than 60 years ago, there
were several such tales. The particular tragedy was the Nazi attempt to wipe out the Jewish people;
the stories were of the remarkable Bohemian Jewish composers sent to the concentration camp of
Terezín (Theresienstadt), who’d had good careers before the war and might have featured in the
history books had their lives not been cruelly cut short. They lived there for years, organising
concerts for the camp orchestra and – incredibly – even composing music.

The Nash’s two concerts – prefaced by two films, including Simon Broughton’s tremendous
documentary on Terezín, made for the BBC – focused on four particularly gifted composers whose
music is now becoming mainstream. But they also glanced at others, whose music survived
oblivion by a hair’s breadth. There was Carlo Taube, a nightclub pianist before the war, whose
Yiddish song about a homeless Jewish child is his only surviving piece. There was Ilse Weber, who
sang lullabies to the children, and who actually volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz with her son,
where they both perished; we heard some of her touchingly ingenuous songs, including one about
the nocturnal peace of the camp that recalled other starlit skies – the ones in romantic songs by
Schubert, before the horrors of Nazism were on the horizon.

All these and others were sung by Konstantin Krimmel with a telling variety of tone, simple and
with an age-old resignation for the Yiddish song, lyrically tender for the starry skies, and
surprisingly fierce for the rare moments of anger. Pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips made the
guitar-strumming simplicity of Weber’s accompaniments seem eloquent.

Yet it was those four gifted composers who had the lion’s share of the evening. The variety of tone
in their music was astonishing. Viktor Ullmann’s String Trio was close to the hyper-romanticism of
early works by Arnold Schoenberg, while Pavel Haas’s extraordinarily original String Quartet No 2
began with vernal happiness, all bird-trills and blustery skies, and ended with 1920s urban sass
summoned with the aid of a drum-kit. Gideon Klein’s String Trio was suffused with Moravian folk-
song, while Hans Krása’s Three Songs expressed surreal oddity tinged with sarcasm. It felt as if the
whole of 1920s and 30s modernism were there. Bohemia was certainly no backwater.