NZSM performs at Kristallnacht Commemoration Concert
On 10 November, musicians from the New Zealand School of Music—Te Kōkī (NZSM) performed musical works related to the Holocaust at this year’s Kristallnacht Commemoration Concert.
Kristallnacht or ‘the night of shattered glass’ was a nationwide assault on German Jewish shops, homes, and cultural centres that happened on the night between 9 and 10 November 1938. The night saw 7500 Jewish shops destroyed, 91 Jews killed, and 30,000 Jews arrested and interned in concentration camps.
For the first time this annual concert was held at the Beth El synagogue. This gave the event an immediate poignancy, as during Kristallnacht more than 200 synagogues were burnt down, and recently the Christchurch terror attacks was also an act of hatred on places of worship.
Thus, this year’s theme of ‘Unity’ emphasised that acts of discrimination and persecution are inter-related and share a culture of hate and divisiveness, and that the fight against anti-Semitism is also the fight against Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination.
This was the message delivered to the audience by Adam Awad, a leader of New Zealand’s former refugee community, and by HCNZ Chair Deborah Hart, who noted that Kristallnacht may have been the last chance for ordinary Germans to stand up against the state-sanctioned persecution of their Jewish neighbours.
NZSM Professor Donald Maurice and fellow senior lecturer Inbal Megiddo were on the organising committee for the event. “There was definitely a more charged atmosphere being in this place of Jewish worship and being conscious of the huge significance of Kristallnacht to the Jewish community,” explains Professor Maurice.
The programme featured the award-winning Sixteen Strings Quartet, who won first prize in the New Zealand Community Trust National Chamber Music Contest; the New Zealand premiere of the Weinberg Piano Trio performed by the Te Kōki Trio; Ruby Solly on the taonga puoro (traditional Māori instruments) who joined the New Zealand String Quartet for a performance of He Poroporoaki; Marietta’s Song by Erich Korngold performed by Margaret Medlyn; and cabaret and jazz music from the concentration camps to end performed by David Barnard, Barbara Graham, and Ben van Leuven.