SEASON 15: VERDI REQUIEM

Mar 11

Written By Guest User

CONDUCTOR

James Gaffigan

SOPRANO

Chabrelle Williams

PROGRAM

Yom Hashoah — Day of Remembrance

All tickets for this event have been reserved.

To check if cancellations have occurred and tickets have been available click here: https://case.edu/maltzcenter/events-and-calendar/calendar/verdis-requiem-yom-hashoah-day-of-remembrance

If you would like to attend but do not yet have a ticket you can come to the Maltz Center for the Performing Arts on May 2 beginning at 7:30 p.m. and wait in the “stand by” line. Tickets will become available on a first come, first serve basis as cancellations and no-shows occur.

James Gaffigan, CityMusic Cleveland Music Director from 2005 to 2010, returns to the podium to lead Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, a masterwork infused with the same drama and passion that mark his greatest operas. This special concert, on the Jewish “Day of Remembrance” (Yom Hashoah), commemorates the victims of the Holocaust. It recalls the sixteen performances of the Requiem in the Nazi concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt), Czechoslovakia by Jewish prisoners who were allowed to carry on musical activities within the walls and barbed wire. The most extraordinary performance took place on June 23, 1944, when the Germans, trying to propagandize against the ominous reports about the camps circulating around the world, hosted a delegation of Swiss and Danish representatives from the International Red Cross. In preparation for the visit, the Nazis “beautified” the camp, stopped the transports to Auschwitz, found appropriate clothes (though no shoes) for the musicians, gave them a few extra rations, and ordered a performance of the Verdi Requiem, which the German officers would attend with their guests. Conductor Rafael Schäcter told his musicians, “We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them.”