Powerful and exceptional Wigmore Hall concert commemorating the Holocaust

United KingdomUnited Kingdom Music in Auschwitz: Commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, various soloists, Wigmore Hall, London, 23.1.2025 (MBr)

Cellists Raphael Wallfisch and pianist Simon Callaghan © Wigmore Hall

Concerts like this one – Music in Auschwitz – are, I think, quite difficult to review. Do I really have a role as a critic, should I express an opinion, or should I perhaps just be an observer of the events and nothing more? It was something partly acknowledged by the narrator, the actor Jason Isaacs, as to how we, as an audience, should even approach a concert such as this one: do we applaud or remain passively silent, for example. How will this music affect us?

I don’t quite know how one is supposed to look at the Holocaust from this particular perspective: music survived and even thrived, music was played and it was composed, while millions of people were systematically imprisoned or murdered in thousands of camps throughout Europe. It was, as the singer Coco Schumann recalled, ‘music made in hell’.

The Nazis destroyed many things like books and art, driven in part by ideology, and in part by eradicating anything Jewish. But music largely survived this oppression and censorship – although certain composers were banned (like Mendelssohn, Berg and Meyerbeer). Music in Auschwitz, however, became a means of control: the commandant Rudolf Höss, drawing on his experiences at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, used prisoners to play marching tunes (like Henryk Krol’s ‘Arbeitslagermarsch’) so prisoners could be more easily counted by prison guards; they were also used to entertain officers and senior members of the SS in private gatherings. Musicians would accompany public executions. But it was just as likely to be played clandestinely too. But however inextricably linked with murder and death music became in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen (where a women’s orchestra was formed), it was also linked with survival: many Jewish musicians would come to survive the selection process and certain death in the gas chambers. But playing in the orchestra rarely allowed you to avoid slave-labour and suicide rates could be high; and few musicians would survive the end of the war once the orchestras were dissolved after November 1944 at Auschwitz.

Music that was played in Auschwitz performed by members of Ensemble 360 © Wigmore Hall

The four opening works on the program – ‘Die schönste Zeit des Lebens’, ‘Chinesische Strassenserenade’, Fidele Bauren’ and ‘Ich wollt’ Ich hätt’ im Wirthauss gleich mein Bett’ – rather dispel the myth that works written in concentration camps were uniformly depressing pieces. These were almost strangely cheerful, from the incongruity of the foxtrot, which is so striking in the first of them, to the almost quasi-Straussian timbre of the Chinese serenade that then seems to unleash itself into the rhythms of a Brahms Hungarian dance. What was so striking about the performances – by members of Ensemble 360 (players made up from the Royal College of Music) – was how each piece seemed to have a difference, a uniqueness of tone – but rather more than this was how it seemed to be working towards a kind of synthesis of ‘camp’ authenticity. It was undeniably a little uncomfortable.

Benjamin Nabarro’s performance of Monti’s Csárdás (in a reduced orchestral version) was a reminder that not all Auschwitz internees were Jewish – some were Roma. Monti’s 1904 violin work is based on a Hungarian folk version and is one of the great virtuoso pieces for the instrument. Nabarro was just fabulous – with a terrific use of rubato, beautiful dynamics – those astonishing harmonics Monti applies that give the allusion of octaves that aren’t quite there – were just magically done. Gemma Rosefield’s performance of Robert Schumann’s Träumerei, which had been played for Joseph Mengele at Auschwitz, was chilling to the bone – and it seemed to tail off like a death-whisper.

The Ensemble’s performance of the second movement from Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata was a reminder that often camp musicians would have to transcribe music in the absence of a decent instrument – like a piano. Raphael Wallfisch’s performance of ‘Cello Sonata’ by Szymon Laks (himself a copyist and arranger in Auschwitz), and written in 1932, is a piece which is dissimilar to much of the music which Laks wrote after Auschwitz; it was exquisitely done and brought out the hints of Ravel and Hindemith that ripple through this jazz inspired work. Bluesy notes rocked moodily in the Andante, sweetly toned by Wallfisch, and the final movement had all the brilliance of its repeated pulse thrummed with spellbinding syncopation. Simon Callaghan was the jazz-perfect pianist.

Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei was the final work, played by Gemma Rosefield with Callaghan again (superbly) at the piano. The cello in this work imitates the voice of a chazzan who chants the liturgy in a synagogue; despite Bruch’s avowed Protestantism, Kol Nidrei can be an inspirationally Jewish piece of music. This was an overwhelming performance, absolutely searing in its power. Perhaps rhapsody wasn’t quite on my mind when I heard Rosefield play this piece: her sound is vast, absolutely enormous; but there is also a gorgeous, burnished tone to it as well. This was playing with – and from – the soul; it looked inwards towards the self and she downright dragged us with her. I have rarely seen a Wigmore Hall audience so spellbound by a player as they were here. Thrilling, moving and in a sense rather terrifying; it rather shook me to the core.

As Jason Isaacs reminded us at the end of this concert the horrors of the Holocaust are not a lesson that has necessarily been learned or heeded. It is a warning from history. Music, I think, as this concert showed has the capacity to be indestructible: it is something which Raphael Wallfisch’s mother, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, believes to be unstoppable since it is constantly being replayed and reborn. Music in Auschwitz was both a way to survive – if not for the rest of one’s life, then at least for that day – but I think it came with the probability of survivor’s guilt: a violin might save you rather than condemn you. But it was often the other way round, too: Reinhard Heydrich, an exceptional violinist, and the son of a composer and the founder of the Halle Conservatory of Music, was also the architect of the Holocaust.

This concert was both moving and powerful. I think if you came out at least asking yourself the question ‘why?’ then it had partly done its work.

Marc Bridle

Narrator: Jason Isaacs

Soloists: Raphael Wallfisch (cello), Gemma Rosefield (cello), Benjamin Nabarro (violin), Claudia Ajmone-Marsan (violin), Simon Callaghan (piano)

From Royal College of Music: Ugne Zuklyte (violin), Enya Barber (violin), Zephyr Will (viola), Clare Juan (cello), Sam Lee (double bass), Emily Crook (clarinet), Hannah Shimwell (clarinet), Megan Glover (saxophone), Milly Deering (trombone), Sean Linton (tuba)

Music that was played in Auschwitz, discovered by Professor Patricia Hall. Arranged by Patricia Hall, Josh Devries, Andrew S Kohler & Oriol Sans
Vittorio Monti – Csárdás
Robert Schumann – Kinderszenen, Op. 15: Träumerei
Beethoven – Piano Sonata No.8 in C minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’: II. Adagio cantabile
Szymon Laks – Cello Sonata No.1
Bruch – Kol Nidrei, Op.47

3 thoughts on “Powerful and exceptional Wigmore Hall concert commemorating the Holocaust”

  1. I fully believe Marc Bridle when he praises the excellence of the performances.
    I am less sure about the title and the framing of the programme: Music in Auschwitz.

    Composer Szymon Laks was in Auschwitz but his 1932 cello sonata was written some ten years earlier. Whether or not it was performed in Auschwitz could be verified by archive records but this is a composition not influenced by Auschwitz.

    I am wondering about ‘Music that was played in Auschwitz, discovered by Professor Patricia Hall. Arranged by Patricia Hall, Josh Devries, Andrew S Kohler & Oriol Sans’. Who wrote the original music, how does one know that it was played in Auschwitz and why was there a need to arrange it?

    Looks like this was a lovely concert but I am sceptical about its presentation as Auschwitz music.

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  2. The original composers for the dance band music performed in Auschwitz I were Franz Grothe, Ludwig Siede, Josef Holetschek and Ludwig Schmidseder.

    The prisoners arranged these hit tunes for the instrumentation of their dance band, that performed on Sundays near the Höss villa. The manuscripts for these arrangements are preserved in the Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. There are many testimonies by former members of the Auschwitz I men’s orchestra describing these Sunday performances.

    I would only add that our U-M team lightly ‘edited’ the manuscripts for things like dynamic consistency. The notes you are hearing are exactly those that appear in the Auschwitz manuscripts, and what the SS heard during those Sunday concerts.

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  3. I do partly agree about the title for this concert. I had been rather expecting more music FROM Auschwitz than we got – although some 200 works are known to exist, much of it, as I suggested in the review, written for marching/work etc. The booklet notes do point to manuscripts in the archive – and indeed composers – or copyists, and sometimes multiple names, on the same manuscripts. Other times works are anonymous. Initially, Patricia Hall only ever wished to make a historical recording for the Auschwitz archive – it was the never the intention for this music to be performed in a concert environment. Hence the arrangement.

    Perhaps I should have mentioned this… although given space, I didn’t. To be honest, whole books have been written about music and the Holocaust and I could have written considerably more on this subject than I did. But, how far do I think it’s necessary in a concert review? I’m not sure.

    You are, of course, right about the Laks sonata, too. I do mention this in the context of the date (1932) – and there’s no evidence it was played in Auschwitz. The Schumann certainly was, and elsewhere (Belsen, for example). It was played by Rafael Wallfisch’s mother – that we do know. The Laks was, in my view, a little odd, I guess – mainly because it’s such a very different stylised work to his later music. But perhaps it did have context. Having said that, it does fit in with some of the tone of the music that did emanate from Auschwitz during this time which is surprisingly jazzy. It’s the complete antithesis of the march music – entirely uplifting really. I think if the music looked one way, what transpired in poetry and literature after the Holocaust – Primo Levi and Paul Celan, for example – probably went in very different directions. Indeed, I might well have framed this concert with excerpts of Levi and Celan rather than the narration we got which was sometimes a little on the clumsy (if not always audible) side.

    Still, it was a fascinating concert.

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