Baltimore Sun shines on upcoming “Lost Childhood” concert

Performers from AOP’s production of Lost Childhood in Tel Aviv, Israel (2009)

Commissioned and developed by AOP, Lost Childhood will be performed in concert at Strathmore Music Center in North Bethesda, MD on Saturday, November 9, 2013 at 8:00 PM. In his profile of the opera for The Baltimore Sun, Fine Arts critic Tim Smith marks the development of the opera from its historical inspiration to is upcoming concert for the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), on November 9-10, 1938, when a series of violent anti-Jewish pogroms occurred throughout Germany and elsewhere.

“… The opera focuses on a Jewish psychiatrist who eluded death as a boy in Poland during the war, and a German colleague born into a family with Nazi sympathies.

“It deals with post-Holocaust revenge, silence and denial, feelings that survivors on both sides, Jews and Germans, felt,” Hamer said. “And it raises questions of forgiveness. It’s a moral topic that is still relevant.”

The opera has been a long time in the making. Azrael and Hamer started on it around 1996. Various workshops were held over the years to develop the piece, most prominently through the organization that commissioned it, American Opera Projects in New York, as well as at the International Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv.

The opera is in two acts with music by Janice Hamer and a libretto by Mary Azrael, and taken from the memoir of the same name by Holocaust survivor Yehuda Nir and Nir’s conversations with Gottfried Wagner (Wagner’s great-grandson).

READ THE FULL BALTIMORE SUN ARTICLE

Lost Childhood concert this November

Judah (Guy Mannheim), right, reflects on his childhood self, Julek (Moran Abouloff) in AOP’s “Lost Childhood” workshop in Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2007.

On Saturday, November 9th, at 8:00pm, the first orchestrated concert performance of Lost Childhood, will be premiered by The National Philharmonic, Piotr Gajewski music director, and The Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, MD. Commissioned and developed by AOP, Lost Childhood is an opera in two acts with music by Janice Hamer and a libretto by Mary Azrael, and taken from the memoir of the same name by Holocaust survivor Yehuda Nir and Nir’s conversations with Gottfried Wagner, the great-grandson of composer Richard Wagner. The opera has been developed over several years, most recently at the International Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv, under the artistic guidance of Joan Dornemann.

The opera begins in 1939 in Lvov, Poland. In the living room of a well-to-do Jewish family, Julek, 9, and his teenage sister dance the tango to music from the radio. Their father enters and turns to the BBC broadcast to hear news of impending war. Fast forward to 1993, an elegant bar in a Manhattan hotel, where Judah, a psychiatrist (formerly the child Julek), sits across from his German colleague, Manfred, born after the war to a prominent family of Nazi sympathizers.

In a gripping confrontation between a post war German and a Jewish Holocaust survivor, each deeply troubled by his own lost childhood, the past comes alive in the present. Through a series of flashbacks, Manfred, tormented, faces his family’s dark past, while Judah reveals for the first time, with bravado and humor, anger and grief, how he, his mother and sister outwitted the Third Reich. With searing emotion and heartwarming lyricism, the music recollects the terrors of the Holocaust and inspires a hopeful vision of the future.

Judah, performed by tenor Michael Hendrick, is based on Nir, a psychiatrist and the author of the memoir The Lost Childhood. The inspiration for Manfred is Nir’s friend Wagner, portrayed by baritone Christopher Trakas. Wagner was a great-grandson of Richard Wagner and a specialist in post-Holocaust dialogue between victims, perpetrators and their descendants.

This performance marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), on November 9-10, 1938, when a series of violent anti-Jewish pogroms occurred throughout Germany and elsewhere.

For ticket prices and more information on the production, click here. (http://www.strathmore.org/eventstickets/calendar/view.asp?id=9316)