Location: Church of the Redeemer UCC
185 Cold Spring Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Open to: General public
Admission: Free
Description: 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)