Variation and Memory
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| free admission |
| Please leave jackets, coats and large bags at the cloakroom or the lockers on the ground floor before entering the Ethnologisches Museum on the 2nd floor. The number of seats is limited, plus additional standing room. In case of overcrowding we have to stop admission temporarily. |
| Duration: 60 min |
| No language skills required |
| Berlin Exhibition, 1st floor, Humboldt Lab, 1st floor |
| Part of: Micro Concerts of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin |
Gideon Klein, born in Czechoslovakia in 1919, was interned in Theresienstadt in 1941 and murdered on January 27, 1945, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz. His last work, a string trio, will be performed by young musicians from the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester academy in the last Micro Concert of the season at two special exhibition venues. In the Humboldt Laboratory, traces lead to the involvement of the Berlin University in the National Socialists’ policy of conquest and extermination: the “General Plan East” for agrarian colonisation, the collection of German dialects in the “living space” of Eastern Europe and a photo collection of “folk” customs. It is not far from the “Interconnections” room of the Berlin Global exhibition to the prisoner uniform from the Ravensbrück concentration camp in the “Fashion” room and documents on the Shoah in the “War” room.
Programme
Gideon Klein (1919-1945)
Trio for Violin, Viola and Violoncello
1. Allegro
2. Lento
3. Molto Vivace
Participants
Arisa Hagiwara began playing the violin at the age of three. She studied with Taro Uemura, Aiko Mizushima, Prof Sebastian Hamann and Prof Julia Schröder. In March 2024, she graduated with the highest distinction from the master’s programme at the Freiburg University of Music after completing her bachelor’s degree at the Tokyo University of the Arts.
She is a member of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and the Gustav Mahler Academy Orchestra (2023-2024). During her studies, she was a guest player/academic with the Freiburg Philharmonic Orchestra and the North German Philharmonic Orchestra Rostock. Since March, she has been an academy member of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB).
She received the first prize at the 40th Ryukyu Shimpo Competition, the excellence prize at the 5th K International Music Competition, high honours at the 25th and 27th Japan Classical Music Competition and 20th Japan Player’s Competition and 4th place at the 13th Beten International Music Competition.
Anna Kalvelage, born in Cologne in 1998, received her first cello lessons at the age of six at the Georg Philipp Telemann Conservatory in Magdeburg with Magdalena Engel. In 2010, she moved to Prof Matias de Oliveira Pinto and has been studying with Prof Stephan Forck at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin since 2016. Masterclasses with professors such as Peter Bruns, Troels Svane, Philippe Muller, Wen-Sinn Yang, Miklos Perenyi and Reinhard Latzko complemented her musical education. In 2015 and 2016, she won a 1st national prize at “Jugend musiziert” in the categories “Special Ensembles” and “Violoncello solo”, both with the highest score and a special prize from the German Foundation for Musical Life.
She first performed as a soloist with an orchestra at the age of ten. In November 2016, she performed as a soloist with “Das Sinfonieorchester Berlin” in the Great Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie. She also performed as a soloist with the Neue Philharmonie Berlin on tour in February 2019. She has performed at numerous festivals, such as the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and the Mecklenburg Festival.
She is supported as a scholarship holder by the Cusanuswerk, the Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now Berlin e. V. organisation and the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben. She is also the winner of the Maria-Ladenburger-Förderpreis 2022.
She has been an academy member of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra since November 2022.
Violist Martha Roske has been a member of the Orchestra Academy of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin since October 2022 and is studying for a master’s degree with Prof. Pauline Sachse at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Academy of Music and Theatre. Born in Berlin, she began her musical career on the violin before switching to the viola at the age of 13. From the very beginning, ensemble playing was one of the most important parts of the young musician’s training. As an academy student at the International Music Academy for the Promotion of Highly Gifted Musicians in Germany, she took part in various chamber music masterclasses and founded the Liebermann String Quartet in 2016, with which she successfully played in several competitions. She gained her first orchestral experience as a member of the Brandenburg Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and as principal violist of the German String Philharmonic Orchestra.
During her bachelor’s degree with Prof Erich Krüger and Prof Ditte Leser at the Franz Liszt School of Music in Weimar, Martha Roske was a substitute in the viola section of the Staatskapelle Weimar and from 2019-2022 was involved in charitable concerts organised by Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now Weimar e. V. She gained further musical inspiration at the Zermatt Music Festival and at masterclasses with Noboku Imai, Barbara Westphal, Danusha Waskiewicz and the Armida Quartet. In 2021, she was awarded a music scholarship from the Hans and Eugenia Jütting Foundation.
Notes on the life and work of Gideon Klein
by Steffen Georgi, rsb concert dramaturge
Composing in Theresienstadt
Until recently, the name Gideon Klein was missing from music encyclopaedias. Instead, he was on the lists used by the SS to register the inmates of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Delivered to the “model ghetto” in December 1941, two days before his 22nd birthday, the young musician, along with Hans Krása, Pavel Haas and Viktor Ullmann, was one of those who felt the “generosity” of the Nazis in the camp. According to the Nazis’ cunning plan, the Theresienstadt Jewish reservation was supposed to look like paradise from the outside.
Before his internment, Gideon Klein had only just been able to complete the piano masterclass at the Prague Conservatory. He had to abandon his further studies (musicology, composition, philosophy) because the German occupiers closed the Czech universities. He now organised musical events in the camp, took on the care of orphans, performed as a pianist and studied chamber music with like-minded people. He also composed (as an autodidact) for the conductors, singers and instrumentalists imprisoned with him, an oppressively carefully selected group of brilliant Jewish artists of the time. “It should only be emphasised that I was encouraged and not hindered in my musical work by Theresienstadt, that we by no means merely sat lamenting by Babylon’s rivers and that our cultural will was adequate to our will to live,” noted Viktor Ullmann in his essay “Goethe and Ghetto” in 1944.
A few weeks after a Nazi propaganda film about the supposed idyll in Theresienstadt was shot in the summer of 1944, the prisoners were deported to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, one by one. Gideon Klein was on the transport that left northern Bohemia on 16 October 1944. He had finished composing his last work, the string trio, on 7 October. He was not yet 25 years old at the time.
The will to culture as the will to live
The scoring and content of the string trio directly relate to the final, escalating situation in which the camp inmates found themselves: Every day, transports of prisoners tore gaps in the ranks of available musicians, making familiar colleagues, friends and family members disappear forever. All three movements of Gideon Klein’s trio use Moravian folk melodies. Nevertheless, the joy of home does not arise. Tonally distorted and rhythmically broken, the folk melodies in the outer movements breathe illusionless sadness, but also strength of character, toughness and pride. In the middle of the middle movement, a series of variations on a folk song, a variation literally constricts the listener’s heart. Quiet, unadorned, monophonic, in a casual andantino tempo and in a rhythmically almost uprooted 5/8 metre, a small melody announces the most thorough of all cruelties, obliteration through forgetting.
Micro Concert #5 is part of a series of concerts in which RSB musicians engage into a dialogue with the exhibitions. The Humboldt Forum and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin are jointly organising the Micro Concerts on Museum Sundays until June 2024 – as part of the RSB’s 100th anniversary.
