David Dalle
Thursday January 29th, 2015 with David Dalle
Jane Bunnett, Kiya and Ziya Tabassian, Constantine Caravassilis and more

Today's show starts with Jane Bunnett and her latest release featuring her new Cuban group Maqueque. We also hear some great Canadian talent on the piano with Christina Petrowska Quilico playing works by Caravassilis and Southam. Canadian Iranian and Armenian musicians round out the show. With one special plunge into darkness, a piano sonata by Viktor Ullmann, a brilliant Austrian Jewish composer who studied with Schoenberg and Zemlinsky and was part of the brilliant firmament of Jewish artists and intellectuals who contributed so much to Austrian-German culture during the opening of the 20th century. He was interned in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 where he lived for 2 years. Theresienstadt housed a large population of the artistic elite of Czech and Austrian Jews and they had a very active cultural life in the camp, which was promoted by the Nazis as propaganda to mask the horrors of the other death camps. Here Viktor Ullman composed an opera, several piano sonatas and other works, which were hidden and smuggled out before he (like most of the inmates of Theresienstadt) was shipped off to Auschwitz in 1944 where he was murdered in a gas chamber upon arrival. We hear his final piano sonata from 1944 which contains many allusions to Mahler, Schoenberg, Jewish and Czech themes, and Bach. The staggering loss to humanity the Holocaust caused defies belief.