Music from Terezín

Baroque Chapel, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin

You don’t have to be a jack-booted, goose-stepping Nazi soldier to strip people of their humanity and liberty, throw them together and incarcerate them in “a state of communal misery”.

No – as the weekend papers reported the recommendations of the UN Committee Against Torture concerning Ireland’s Magdalene laundries – you could be a nun.

This is why the post-Holocaust slogan “never again” can never be repeated often enough, and how a concert like this (part of the KBC Music in Great Irish Houses Festival) can be so charged not just with historic but also contemporary pathos.

Most of the music was written in Terezín, or Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp near Prague for the cultural elite and children. Even after the Nazis successfully filmed “happy” scenes from the camp for propaganda purposes, most inmates – including all but one of the Terezín composers presented here – were transported to Auschwitz and gassed.

Soprano Lynda Lee and pianist Dearbhla Collins led the performances with a selection reflecting Europe’s wide stylistic range at the time – including art songs, sentimental popular songs and cabaret – as existed in microcosm in the camp.

Lee needed no dramatisation, deploying a tender tone whether in the simple but poignant tunes of writer Ilse Weber – who nursed children in the camp, ultimately volunteering to accompany them into the gas chamber – or in the almost crooner-style of

Ich Weiss bestimmt, ich werd dich wiedersehen

(“I know for certain I’ll see you again“) by Adolf Strauss, or in the beautifully crafted and emotionally delicate

Beryozkele

(“Birch tree“) by Viktor Ullmann.

Both Lee and the ever-sensitive Collins switched with ease between these different styles, gently supported by Dermot Dunne (accordion) and violinist Katherine Hunka who also persuasively blended passion and technique in a moving performance of Erwin Schulhoff’s Solo Sonata.

Against the backdrop of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham’s Baroque Chapel, director Tom Creed’s small elements of staging added to the spirit, as did actor Barry McGovern’s short readings between pieces.