by Robert Rollin
Last Friday evening, December 4, the Cavani String Quartet (Annie Fullard and Mari Sato, violins, Kirsten Docter, viola, and Merry Peckham, cello) — who serve as Artists-in-Residence at the Cleveland Institute of Music — presented a stellar concert of Czech music in Kulas Hall as the final event of the CIM Violins of Hope concert series. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Composer Erwin Schulhoff, who perished in the Holocaust, wrote in his 1919 avant-garde music manifesto: The idea of revolution in art has evolved for decades…This is particularly true in music, because this art form is the liveliest, and as a result reflects the revolution most strongly and deeply — the complete escape from imperialistic tonality and rhythm, the climb to an ecstatic change for the better.
“I love that quote,” violinist Annie Fullard said during a telephone conversation. “It’s so upsetting that Schulhoff’s life was cut short.” On Friday, December 4 at 8:00 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Cavani Quartet (Annie Fullard and Mari Sato, violins, Kirsten Docter, viola, and Merry Peckham, cello) will perform two pieces by Schulhoff — Divertimento for String Quartet, Op. 14 and String Sextet — as part of a CIM Violins of Hope Faculty Recital. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
When Hedy Milgrom’s mother and relatives emerged from a cattle car at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the first thing they saw and heard was an orchestra playing on the train platform. “My mom turned to her sister and said, ‘See, there’s an orchestra here. There’s music. They’re playing violin. How bad could it be?’ Very bad, as they found out within minutes.”
That orchestra was the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, to be commemorated by the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra in a free concert on Sunday, December 6 at 3:00 pm in Kangesser Hall at The Park Synagogue. Robert Cronquist will conduct music by Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Erich Korngold, and Frédéric Chopin in a performance narrated by WCLV president Robert Conrad. Hedy Milgrom, who is vice-president for endowments and development at the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, will share some personal reflections. [Read more…]
by Nicholas Jones
String players sometimes say that instruments can “remember their past” — that one can tell the quality of the previous owner by listening to the violin’s tone. Played for years by a mediocre player, the violin settles into mediocrity; played by the best, the violin becomes the best. The violins played in last week’s community concert at Severance Hall have a long and heavy past. Now, restored to life, they seem to remember the tragedy and the hope of the Holocaust, a memory that can remind us of the worst and the best in human life. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
CLEVELAND — The warm fall sun shone brightly on the University Circle district on Sept. 27 as 1,000 people gathered to celebrate the opening of Case Western Reserve University’s new Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at The Temple-Tifereth Israel. The centerpiece of the afternoon was a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Franz Welser-Möst featuring violinist Shlomo Mintz. At the same time, the event launched Violins of Hope Cleveland — a four-month, multifaceted celebration of the triumph of the human spirit through the voices of violins that survived the Holocaust.
Violins of Hope Cleveland is a ground-breaking collaboration among seven Cleveland non-profit organizations and a dozen affiliates that brings to Cleveland’s Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage some twenty violins connected to the Holocaust. Played by Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, the instruments have been collected and restored by Israeli violin maker Amnon Weinstein. Read the article on Classical Voice North America, the Journal of the Music Critics Association of North America
Cleveland—September 8, 2014.
The Cleveland Orchestra announced today that the Israel Philharmonic, led by its music director, Zubin Mehta, will perform in Severance Hall on Monday, November 16 at 7:30 pm as part of the Violins of Hope Project. The event, part of an eight-city tour of the United States, will be presented in collaboration with the Jewish Federation of Cleveland. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
What may be the largest group of Cleveland cultural institutions ever to circle their wagons around a single project will come into play this fall when Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Music, The Cleveland Orchestra, Facing History and Ourselves, Ideastream, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage join together to present Violins of Hope Cleveland.
Four months of concerts, exhibitions, screenings, lectures, theatrical productions, and educational offerings will center around the extraordinary collection of violins amassed by Tel Aviv violinmaker Amnon Weinstein, instruments that managed to survive the Holocaust.
Weinstein, who emigrated from Eastern Europe to open a violin shop in Palestine in 1938, learned after World War II that some four hundred of his family members had perished under the Nazis. Later, he heard a heartfelt account from a survivor who had brought an instrument in for restoration of what the violin and its music had meant to Jews during those horrific days. In 1996 — and now recognized as one of the finest violinmakers in the world — Weinstein decided to put out a call for Holocaust-era violins. To date, he has restored nearly fifty such instruments to playing condition, a collection he dubbed “Violins of Hope.” [Read more…]