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An evening to remember
While Al is off at bird camp, I'll tell you that I met him last Monday evening at the Governor's Mansion here in Olympia, Washington, the state capital. There is a series of chamber music concerts at the Mansion every year, and Al comes down from the far north of the state to record them all, being as that is his line of work. You generally have to be a paying member of the Mansion Foundation, or some such, to hear the concerts, but Al was able to get me a guest pass. So there he was, I recognized him right away, and we talked for a bit and he gave me a tour of the part of the Mansion that was open. (The governor and her husband were elsewhere.) Al was very nice, soft-spoken, and much more of a teddy-bear than a curmudgeon. Meeting him was noteworthy not only in that he was Al, but he was also the first person with Wegener's that I have ever met. (Al's wife was teaching elsewhere, so I didn't get to meet her.)
The music was very impressive, all written for string quartets, trios, or duos, and played by excellent musicians, three of whom were born in Russia. All the pieces were written by inmates of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany while they were incarcerated. This was a "model" camp called Terezin, designed to present a false image of what the camps were like, to make people think the arts were promoted, that people were living in a civilized and dignified fashion. The composers and performers were routinely shipped off to the extermination camps when they had served their purpose. The music was very spirited, whimsical, and energetic, for the most part, and really superb. It was hard to imagine it being a product of the victims of the Nazis. The pieces as a collection were called Far Is My Home, and brought together by a Seattle organization called Music of Remembrance, whose mission is "ensuring that the voices of musical witness be heard". The composers were Gideon Klein, Robert Dauber, Hans Krasa, and Szymon Laks. As I understand it the works were performed in the camp but nowhere else, as there was a ban on performances in Germany by any living or historical Jewish composers.
Thanks again to Al for arranging for me to meet him and hear this performance of very special music!
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Originally Posted by mr.g
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