The driving rhythms, arching melodies and orchestral panache of Hans Krása’s Overture for Small Orchestra barely hint at the place it was written: the Theresienstadt ghetto. It proved impossible to perform Krása’s Overture in Theresienstadt, unlike Pavel Haas’s Study for Strings, written and played there in 1943. The angry cross rhythms and Moravian tunes typical of the composer fill this concise but powerful work.
Krása and Haas were both murdered at Auschwitz. Erwin Schulhoff met his end at a camp in Wülzburg. After a career marked by his interest in surrealism and jazz, Schulhoff’s Symphony No 5, completed in 1939, appears to revel in the plushness of the symphony orchestra. What soon emerges is a score charged with tension and foreboding, whose culmination in unrestrained aggression now seems unsettlingly prophetic.
Produced by the BBC Symphony Orchestra
Please note that this event deals with subjects of a distressing nature
