In the spring of 1944, a handpicked group of Nazi officers was treated to an unusual performance by inmates in a concentration camp. What appeared to be a soaring rendition of a choral masterpiece was intended as a subversive condemnation of the Nazis and a desperate message to the outside world. In the face of horrific living conditions, slave labor and the constant threat of deportation to Auschwitz, the Jewish inmates of Terezin concentration camp — artists, musicians, poets and writers — fought back with art and music.

Led by conductor Raphael Schächter, a chorus of 150 inmates performed one of the world’s most difficult and powerful choral works, Verdi’s Requiem, a Catholic work re-imagined by imprisoned Jews as a condemnation of their captors. Ultimately, they performed for Nazi senior officers and the International Red Cross, singing what they dared not say.

Six decades later, conductor Murry Sidlin and a new choir take Verdi’s Requiem back to Terezin to reawaken this little known chapter of heroism and the resilience of the human spirit. Combining soaring concert footage, powerful survivor recollections, evocative animation, archival images and the prisoners’ own artwork, this artistic uprising is brought to life in Defiant Requiem: Voices of Resistance, premiering Holocaust Remembrance Day, Sunday, April 7, on WGBH, with narrator Bebe Neuwirth. See the full broadcast schedule.

Watch Preview on PBS. See more from Defiant Requiem: Voices of Resistance.
 

Just 40 miles west of Prague, the old fortress town of Terezin had been converted into a makeshift “holding pen” for the Czech Jews during World War II. Within months, the town built for 6,000 people was bursting with nearly 60,000 Jewish inmates. An imprisoned conductor, Schächter rallied his fellow inmates with clandestine musical gatherings, and what began as a fight for survival soon exploded into a cultural rebellion. Artists captured the horrors around them on paper, playwrights staged plays with makeshift sets and costumes, composers wrote new compositions, and thousands of concerts and lectures provided late- night escape for inmates longing for a return to humanity.

This artistic uprising reached its peak when Schächter attempted a performance of one of the world’s most demanding choral works, Verdi’s Requiem, intended as a condemnation of the Nazis. Schächter painstakingly taught the Latin text, which promised divine judgment against evil, to his choir of 150, using a single smuggled score. They performed the Requiem 16 times for fellow prisoners, accompanied only by a single piano.

Eventually, the Nazis took notice of the artistic enclave at Terezin; rather than crush it, they twisted it to their own advantage. They invited the International Red Cross for a highly orchestrated visit to what they call a “self-governed Jewish city” and cynically documented the town’s makeover in an infamous propaganda film, The Führer Gives a City to the Jews. Following massive deportations, Schächter’s choir had been reduced to 60, but they seized the opportunity to use their music to confront the Nazis under the gaze of the Red Cross delegation, desperately hoping their condemnation might pierce the painstakingly staged propaganda.

Now, 60 years later, conductor Murry Sidlin has realized his dream of bringing his own chorus to Terezin to honor Schächter and all those who were imprisoned in Terezin. In a former warehouse – where Nazi commandants once worked Jewish prisoners to their deaths – more than 160 young American singers and instrumentalists, along with an orchestra from Prague, gathered to perform Maestro Sidlin’s concert drama The Defiant Requiem. To capture this extraordinary moment, producer Peter Schnall and Partisan Pictures filmed the historic concert with an international crew. Schnall and director/writer Doug Shultz used this powerful and moving performance to re-tell the story of Schächter, his chorus and Terezin.

For Schnall, his journey to this former Nazi concentration camp became more than just another filmic experience. During production, he learned, for the first time, that his own great-grandmother had died while imprisoned within the walls of Terezin.
 

Conductor Harry Christophers and The Sixteen have just released a recording of Handel's oratorio Saul.

The soloists include sopranos Elizabeth Atherton and Joélle Harvey, mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, tenors Jeremy Budd, Mark Dobell, Robert Murray, and Tom Raskin, and basses Ben Davies, Eamonn Dougan, Christopher Purves, and Stuart Young.

Saul was Handel's fourth English oratorio, but it was the first one he wrote after he had given up once and for all on Italian opera. He wrote it at the age of 53, having made a full recovery following a debilitating illness he suffered the year before that affected his playing and his mental health. Saul also marked Handel's first collaboration with librettist Charles Jennens, with whom he would later collaborate on several other oratorios, including Israel in Egypt and Messiah. In many ways, then, Saul marks a new beginning for Handel, the start of his greatest creative period.

How appropriate, then, that this oratorio is concerned with events that take place during the Feast of the New Moon, the beginning of the Jewish New Year. It's a story of death and renewal: the Lear-like fall of Saul, a once-great king who succumbs to feelings of murderous jealousy of the young David, who at the beginning of the oratorio is fresh from his victory over Goliath and at the end is crowned king, an important figure in all the Abrahamic religions. Handel treats this story as a true epic, calling for the largest cast and richest orchestration of any of his oratorios.

This week we'll be hearing a brand-new recording of the work by The Sixteen conducted by Harry Christophers, who is also the director of Boston's own Handel and Haydn Society. One of the notable features of the recording is the casting of the role of David, usually sung by a countertenor, as a female mezzo-soprano, which apparently was Handel's original intention. On this recording the role is sung by Sarah Connolly; in an Opera Today review of her performance of this role at the Barbican, Connolly is said to have "demonstrated that in the right hands, the richness, depth and flexibility of a female mezzo-soprano voice can work wonders in the role...here she gave a finely moulded, intelligent performance of great beauty."

This recording will be heard in four installments, during the 9pm hour on Monday and during the 10pm hour Tuesday through Thursday, in celebration of Rosh Hashanah.

See a libretto

Harry Christophers will conduct another Handel oratorio in Boston during the 2012-2013 season. The concluding concert of the coming season of the Handel and Haydn Society features Handel's Jeptha, and will feature two of the soloists heard in The Sixteen's Saul, including Joélle Harvey and Robert Murray.

The Passion, or the story of the capture and execution of Jesus, is the heart of belief for Christians. For non-Christians, the Passion can be a powerful story of great emotional weight, especially when told through great works of art and music.

New England audiences have an opportunity to hear three of those musical interpretations in concerts given by Boston's Handel and Haydn Society and by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. H&H gave the first complete performance of J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1879, and as part of the crescendo towards the ensemble's 200th anniversary, Artistic Director Harry Christophers leads H&H in this pinnacle of Bach's sacred works on March 30 and April 1. Classical New England broadcasts the April 1 performance live from Symphony Hall.
 

On April 6, Boston Modern Orchestra Project performs a concert entitled "Dual Passions" with Artistic Director Gil Rose, conductor Andrew Clark, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum. The concert begins with the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning composition, the little match girl passion, by David Lang, with the second half devoted to Arvo Pärt's Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Secundum Joannem, a setting of the Passion according to St. John written in 1982.

I talked with both Harry Christophers and Gil Rose about the Passion and the particular ways these three composers bring this transformative story to musical life:
 

Here is an extended interview about David Lang's the little match girl passion and Arvo Pärt's Passio Domini with conductor Gil Rose:
 

For more with Harry Christophers and Bach's St. Matthew Passion, hear a two-part series of The Bach Hour:

The St. Matthew Passion on The Bach Hour, Part One

The St. Matthew Passion on The Bach Hour, Part Two

More about these concerts can be found by visiting the Handel and Haydn Society and Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

Messiah, originally written to benefit the Foundling Hospital in Dublin, was premiered in 1742 during the season of Lent, the penitential time of year preceding Easter. 

Handel had more or less invented the oratorio as a way of staging performances at that time of year.  Opera houses were dark for the season, so the oratorio, with the recitatives, arias, and choruses of opera but none of the staging, was a pathway to entertaining, dramatic music and performances ... and the resulting box office receipts.

But not long after that first performance, Messiah found a home during the Christmas season, and it's stayed there almost exclusively ever since.  The Handel and Haydn Society gave the U.S. premiere in 1818, and now Messiah can be found every year in countless performances around the country.

I looked into the Messiah phenomenon with Thomas Forrest Kelly of Harvard University, Handel and Haydn Society Artistic Director Harry Christophers, and Masterworks Chorale Music Director Steven Karidoyanes. To hear the feature, click on "Listen" above.
 

Boston Baroque, Dec. 7 & 8

Providence Singers, Dec. 8

Trinity Church, Dec. 9

Masterworks Chorale Sing, Dec. 14 & 15

And here is video from a previous Masterworks Chorale Sing: