September 2009 Archives

Another great icon of the music world has left us--Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha at 86. The obituary in the September 26 New York Times is here.

I remember hearing her playing solo recitals in Los Angeles in the 1970s-early 80s and was awestruck how such a diminutive performer could take total mastery of the piano and create glorious sonic worlds with works by Mompou, Albéniz, and others. To access de Larrocha's recordings owned by Princeton, click here. We need to beef up our holdings with some recent CD reissues and later performances.

Darwin

The first six CDs in the important new release KZ Musik: Encyclopedia of Music Composed in Concentration Camps (1933-1945) are now available under the call no. CD 31800--click these links to see catalog records for each of the CDs (select long view to see full descriptive information such as the contents notes and performers) :

• vol. 1 -- vol. 2 -- vol. 3 -- vol. 4 -- vol. 5 -- vol. 6

This series, released by Musikstrasse in Rome, Italy, and supervised by pianist, organist, and conductor Francesco Lotoro,  will comprise 24 CDs upon completion in three years and represents the most comprehensive recordings of music produced by victims of the Holocaust to date. A brief comment (by Lotoro?) on the case of each CD, with the English much edited, reads:

All the musical works originate from imprisoned composers and musicians in Aushwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, and other concentration camps. They represent one of mankind's most important preserved heritages of the unique history of the tragedy of the deportations and the human catastrophe of the Shoah--the remembrance as a DNA of the history.

The CD notes provide this overview:

KZ Musik is the most up-to-date and complete CD encyclopedia of musical works composed by musicians imprisoned in the camps between 1933 (when Dachau and Börgermoor operned) and 1945. These works range from operas and symphonies to chamber, instrumental and piano music, from Lieder, choral pieces and cabaret songs to jazz, religious, traditional and folk music --as well as fragments and pieces reconstructed after the end of World War II. The composers were imprisoned, deported, murdered--some even survived--but all were of different national, social and religious backgrounds. They suffered their different fates in prison, transit and labour camps, concentration and death camps, POW camps (Oflags specifically for officers, and Stalags for non-commissioned military personnel) and military prisons: during the Third Reich, in Italy, Japan and the Republic of Salò, under the Vichy regime and other Axis powers--and in Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and other Allied countries. KZ Musik is the result of the extensive musicological research carried out by Italian pianist and conductor Francesco Lotoro. Each KZ Musik CD booklet contains information about the different camps the recorded works were written in, interesting facts about the composers and their works as well as brief remarks and original language lyrics in the case of choral and vocal works."

More about this release can be found on the Musikstrasse Web site (click here). Be forewarned, however, that the English is garbled. Those who read Italian may wish to click on the Italian-language option.

Darwin