About this concert
In his acclaimed book Time’s Echo – Music, Memory and the Second World War, historian and music critic Jeremy Eichler shows how composers transformed their wartime experiences into resounding monuments. Together with the author, we make the past audible and tangible in the Recital Hall. In collaboration with the Concertgebouw and Concert Friends, we present three string quartets in memory of the victims of war and dictatorship.
We’ll perform Reminiscences, a moving work by Ukrainian composer Hanna Havrylets, who died two days after the Russian invasion in 2022. In Steve Reich's Different Trains, the strings engage in a fascinating interaction with recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors. In 1939, Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg fled from the Nazis by escaping to the Soviet Union, only to be confronted with even more anti-Semitism – and Stalin's reign of terror. His stunning, highly accessible String Quartet No. 6 from 1946 was banned before a single note had been played. It was not until 2007, eleven years after Weinberg's death, that the work received its premiere.
In Steve Reich's Different Trains, the strings engage in a fascinating interaction with recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
