Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto with Johan Dalene

Over this program by Tomáš Hanus and the young Swedish violin prodigy Johan Dalene hangs the battle shadow of the Third Reich: music from Theresienstadt by Ullmann and Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, banned during the war.

A symphony from the camp
The Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann, while imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, complained not about the degrading living conditions, but about the lack of music paper - he used the back of discarded deportation lists to hold on to his musical incursions. He notated his symphonies in the form of piano sonatas, with a note here and there about the instrumentation; working them out practically was, of course, completely pointless for himself. In exemplary fashion, the German composer Bernhard Wulff deciphered Ullmann's sketches and worked them into completely convincing scores.

Mendelssohn and Strauss
Thanks to the immense success of his opera Der Rosenkavalier and the symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra, Richard Strauss was considered the greatest living German tone poet. He seemed untouchable - and behaved that way - but in the meantime stood in agony for his Jewish grandchildren. Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto was not played again in Amsterdam by the Concertgebouw Orchestra until Sept. 1, 1945, after five years of enforced silence. Soloist then was the Jewish concertmaster Jo Hekster.