During the concert, featuring well-known instrumentalists Radosław Pujanek, Wojciech Fudala, and Michał Rot, we will hear deeply moving Jewish music composed before and after the Holocaust. Works by Ernest Bloch and Mieczysław Weinberg will be followed by a recent composition by Krzesimir Dębski, inspired by this style.

Swiss-born Ernest Bloch was one of the first composers to develop a style of Jewish music modelled on other nations fighting for their independence. His 1923 Baal Shem is a trio of aural illustrations of the religious practices of Hasidism, a mystical Judaic movement born in 18th-century Poland. The first two movements reference meditation and ecstatic prayer, while the third celebrates the joyful autumn holiday of Simchat Torah.

Mieczysław Weinberg’s Piano Trio (“a composer from three worlds”, as Danuta Gwizdalanka described this Polish Jew working in the USSR) dates from the devastation-stricken year of 1945. After escaping Poland, the artist managed to settle in Moscow thanks to the help of Dmitri Shostakovich. Neither while writing the piece nor later did the composer learn of the fate of his family. In this heartbreaking work, it is hard not to hear a commentary on the horrors of war that words cannot express. Similar associations arise with the dramatic Toccata and the elegiac Poem. In 1953, Stalin, as part of the “Kremlin doctors’ conspiracy”, decided, for anti-Semitic reasons, to imprison Weinberg in Lubyanka prison. Thanks to Shostakovich’s intervention and the dictator’s unexpected death, the composer avoided the fate of Siberian exile. Dedicated to his colleague and friend, the moving Violin Sonata No. 5 was written shortly thereafter. This expansive work seems emotionally cooler than the trio, but this is a paradox. Music composed in totalitarian states often, through irony or double coding, expresses extreme emotions such as despair under the guise of calm and control.

The most recent of the works presented this evening, having been written in the 21st century, will be Krzesimir Dębski’s concert piece, titled Dos lid far jidisze fidl (Song for Jewish Violin). We will hear it in an arrangement for violin and piano. It is inspired by the art left behind by his lost neighbours and brethren.