Encounter IV: Forbidden Music, led by Ara Guzelimian

The global rupture of World War II had as profound an impact on musical life as it did on other facets of society. At Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp propagandized as a thriving cultural enclave, the composers Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, and Gideon Klein were among those Jewish artists whose work was used to conceal the atrocities suffered throughout the prison. The Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff was likewise silenced by the war, dying in a concentration camp in Bavaria. The lives of those who survived tell a story, also. Schoenberg, Bartók, Korngold, Hindemith, and others fled war-ravaged Europe for America; their displacement indelibly altered the course of music history. At this season’s final Encounter, Ara Guzelimian probes this inescapable aspect of the arc of Central European music, exploring the traumatic ripple effect that would be felt across the Western world, from Berlin, Prague, and Vienna to Hollywood and New York.
Tickets: $45 (full price) | $20 (under age thirty)