{"id":8195,"date":"2010-11-03T00:00:55","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T07:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=8195"},"modified":"2010-11-06T06:34:55","modified_gmt":"2010-11-06T13:34:55","slug":"raanana-symphonette-to-open-holocaust-education-week-in-ottawa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=8195","title":{"rendered":"Raanana Symphonette to Open Holocaust Education Week in Ottawa"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Raanana Symphonette\/Photo: Gadi Dagon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Raanana Symphonette has been invited by the Israeli Embassy in Canada and the Jewish Federation of Ottawa to launch Holocaust Education Week on November 9, 2010 with a gala concert conducted by David Sebba. The concert will take place at the close of the Ottawa Conference on Combatting anti-Semitism (November 7 \u2013 9) and will be performed in the presence of the Israeli Ambassador to Canada and other diplomats, Ministers and representatives of the Canadian parliament, as well as Israeli government Ministers and Knesset members.<\/p>\n

The concert program will include a tribute to the violinist Alma Ros\u00e9 (1906 \u2013 1944). Ros\u00e9, the neice of Gustav Mahler, was born into a musical family \u2013 her father, Arnold Ros\u00e9 was a virtuoso violinist and led the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from 1881 \u2013 1931, as well as the Ros\u00e9 String Quartet. Alma Ros\u00e9 embarked on a successful musical career, founding in 1932 the women\u2019s orchestra Die Wiener Walzerm\u00e4deln (The Waltzing Girls of Vienna), which toured Europe extensively during the pre-war period. Ros\u00e9 was ultimately captured by the Nazis and brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she directed a women\u2019s orchestra, compelled to play for their captors in order to survive.<\/p>\n

The tribute concert, Alma Ros\u00e9: Vienna to Auschwitz, will include works performed by The Waltzing Girls of Vienna before the war and works performed by the women\u2019s orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau. This performance in Canada is all the more meaningful as Alma\u2019s brother z\u201dl, was a professor of music at Western Ontario University for thirty years. Today, the University\u2019s Music library archive holds the Mahler-Ros\u00e9 collection, preserving the family\u2019s heritage with personal letters, documents, photographs and Alma\u2019s concert programs, some of which have been given permission to be used for the concert.<\/p>\n

Composer Uri Vidislavsky\u2019s \u201cThe Last Waltz\u201d will have a world premiere at the November 9th concert. \u201cThe Last Waltz\u201d is an orchestral suite based on six waltzes written by Uri Vidislavsky over the past twenty years. Taking the musical form of the waltz as its starting point, the work confronts the memory of the Holocaust from the perspective of the third generation. In a press release, Vidislavsky expressed his feeling that today, 65 years after the end of the war, memory, forgetting and distortion recompose themselves to create a contemporary perspective on the Holocaust. He chose to compose a piece based on the proximity of terror and happiness, loneliness and unity, the depths of human despair and hope and the continuity of life. The suite is a memory of an era, a world, a way of life, a single distant moment – in the hope that such a dark time will never return.<\/p>\n

The Raanana Symphonette will conduct several concerts during their stay in Canada, with the theme of \u201cAlma Ros\u00e9: Vienna to Auschwitz.\u201d Much of the research for this concert was based on the book by Richard Newman with Karen Kirtly, Alma Ros\u00e9: Vienna to Auschwitz<\/em>. The Raanana Symphonette has a strong commitment to preserving Jewish musical heritage and the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. In 2007 the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra together with the compower Leon Szydlowski won the prestigious Angel Prize for the creation and making of original Israeli music.<\/p>\n

Holocaust Education Week is an annual event of the Shoah Committee of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, intended to teach the legacy of the Holocaust and promote tolerance and compassion through a program of lectures, films, cultural programs and book readings.<\/p>\n

The Raanana Symphonette\u2019s tour to Canada is made possible through the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Yad VaShem, the Rich Foundation and the Raanana Symphonette Holocaust Memorial Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Raanana Symphonette has been invited by the Israeli Embassy in Canada and the Jewish Federation of Ottawa to launch Holocaust Education Week on November 9, 2010 with a gala concert conducted by David Sebba. The concert will take place at the close of the Ottawa Conference on Combatting anti-Semitism (November 7 \u2013 9) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}