Camerata Chamber Chorus | Whitbourn: Annelies

Event time: 
Sunday, November 9, 2014 - 11:00am to 1:00pm
Location: 
Church of the Redeemer UCC See map
185 Cold Spring Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Admission: 
Free
Open to: 
General Public
Event description: 

Note: Additional parking available at the Worthington Hooker Middle School at 691 Whitney Ave.

Marguerite L. Brooks, conductor


Michael Weinberg, principal assistant conductor

Andrew Grenci, clarinet
Lisa Rautenberg, violin
Rebecca Patterson, violoncello
Erika Schroth, piano

 

PROGRAM

James Whitbourn: Annelies 

Sid Robinovitch: Prayer Before Sleep

Mark Miller: Before Too Long

 


“One day this terrible war will be over and we’ll be people again.”  (Anne Frank, 11 April 1944.)

Had Anne Frank not died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she would be 85 years old today.  Her diary, written  between 1942 and 1944 while she and her family were in hiding during the German occupation of Amsterdam, is the basis for the libretto of James Whitbourn’s dramatic and poignant composition Annelies. Whitbourn and his librettist, Melanie Challenger, contrast captivity and freedom;  the darkness of the hidden apartment and the light of the sky; fear and hope.

The relevance  of  the observations  of a young girl to other global conflicts beyond anti-Semitism has been noted by many writers and speakers,  who posit a world in which all human beings could learn to live together without killing each other over cultural, racial or religious differences.

The text of Mark Miller’s Before Too Long, also written by a child, this one imprisoned in Terezin, says it all:

            I’d like to go away alone,

            Where there are other, nicer people,

             Somewhere into the far unknown,

             There, where no one kills another.

 

             Maybe more of us, a thousand strong will reach this goal before too long.

                          (from I never Saw Another Butterfly…Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin)