• Jan 26, 2023

Music of Remembrance honors International Holocaust Remembrance Day with free streaming of "Wertheim Park" by Lori Laitman

 Online Premiere of “Wertheim Park” by Lori Laitman


January 26, 2023

Contact: Mina Miller, Artistic Director

(206) 365-7770

info@musicofremembrance.org

www.musicofremembrance.org


 Music of Remembrance honors International Holocaust Remembrance Day with free streaming of Wertheim Park by Lori Laitman

SEATTLE, WA—To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Music of Remembrance offers a free streaming of composer Lori Laitman's Wertheim Park. The program will begin streaming on Friday, January 27 and remain available online.

Wertheim Park is Laitman’s sixth commission for Music of Remembrance, following such important works as her 2010 oratorio Vedem about the true story of the teenage prisoners and the secret journal they created under the noses of their Nazi captors. The new work, setting a poem by the late Susan de Sola, is a haunting elegy about the power of bearing witness. It pictures the annual gathering at Amsterdam’s Wertheim Park, where people come together each year for Holocaust remembrance. They come to march, and to recite the names of those whose lives were cut short. They keep memory alive, and strengthen the bonds between generations past, present and future.

"When Music of Remembrance asked me to compose a piece for their 25th season," said Laitman, "I decided to explore the impact of the Holocaust on the next generation. Poet Susan de Sola lost many of her relatives in the Shoah, and Wertheim Park is an intimate depiction of the memorial march and its emotional impact on her."

The streamed program is an enhanced video of the work’s world premiere by Music of Remembrance on October 30, 2022 at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall. It features soprano Alisa Jordheim, with an instrumental ensemble of Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Jonathan Green, double bass; and Mina Miller, piano.


 

About Music of Remembrance

Now in its 25th year, MOR remembers the Holocaust through music and honors the resilience of all people excluded or persecuted for their faith, nationality, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. In addition to rediscovering and performing music from the Holocaust, MOR has commissioned and premiered more than 40 new works by some of today’s leading composers, drawing on the Holocaust’s lessons to address urgent questions for our own time.

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