Vedem, a Holocaust oratorio by award-winning American composer Lori Laitman and librettist David Mason, with the celebrated Northwest Boychoir joined by soloists Ross Hauck, tenor, and Karen Early Evans, soprano.
Commissioned and premiered by Music Of Remembrance (MOR) in 2010, Vedem tells the remarkable story of a group of teenage boys in the Terezín concentration camp and the secret magazine they created every week for two years under the noses of their Nazi captors. Miraculously, many of the magazine’s articles, poetry and illustrations have survived because one of the boys managed to bury nearly 800 manuscript pages and return to recover them after the camp’s liberation. The arias in Laitman’s oratorio draw on the young prisoners’ poems, woven into David Mason’s dramatic libretto portraying the children’s lives and ultimate fate. Of the roughly one hundred boys who contributed to Vedem, only fifteen lived to see the end of the war.
The program also includes the music of Czech composers:
Jaroslav Ježek: Duo for Two violins (1934) performed by Seattle Symphony violinists Artur Girsky and Mikhail Shmidt, and Bugatti Step (1927-37) performed by Seattle Symphony musicians Mikhail Shmidt (violin) and Walter Gray (cello), and pianist Mina Mille
Egon Ledeč: Kyticka (1940), performed by MOR’s 2016 David Tonkonogui Memorial Award recipient Evan Johanson, violin and Mina Miller, piano.