SAN DIEGO (Press Release)–“Music and Resistance” at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 26, will be an evening of music sung and played during some of the darkest days of the Holocaust, according to San Diego State University’s Jewish Studies Program which is sponsoring the on-campus event at Rhapsody Hall. Sung by Jews and Roma, these are the songs that emboldened and gave them hope, that said to their Nazi aggressors that the human spirit is not so easily defeated.
The program will include the West Coast premiere of Yale Strom’s “In The Memory Of…” a composition for string quartet. “In The Memory Of…” is based upon a lost cantor’s music book, found by Strom in an abandoned synagogue in Carei, Romania. The majority (2,200) of Carei’s Jewish community was deported to Auschwitz in May 1944, (by the Hungarians and Germans). Only 400 returned.
Strom took musical themes from the cantor’s book that were sung on the Sabbath and holidays and wove them into a moving tribute to the cantor and his parishioners who sang these melodies, even in the ghetto before they were forced to board the cattle cars.
The string quartet will be performed by the Hausmann Quartet, currently in residence in SDSU’s Music Department. After the quartet, Strom’s klezmer ensemble Hot Pstromi will perform songs of resistance and hope that were sung by Jews and Roma in the ghettos, camps and forests.
Since the Hausmann Quartet’s formation in the summer of 2004 at LyricaFest in New Jersey, they have been acquiring a reputation as one of the great young quartets performing today. Praised for their charismatic playing and “marvelously rich tone”, the quartet made its debut on the Lyrica Boston Chamber Music series. It promplty was included in the Lyrica Boston’s Young Artists in Residence program.
In 2006, quartet members were named Norfolk Festival’s Quartet Fellows in Residence. Highlights of 2007 included a tenure as quartet in residence at the Blossom Music Festival, as well as being selected to showcase at the Chamber Music America Conference in New York. More recently, the quartet was invited to return as Shouse Artists to the 2009 Great Lakes Festival, and was awarded a fellowship for Aspen Music Festival’s Center for Advanced Quartet Studies.
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Preceding based on material provided by San Diego State University.