The Nash Ensemble’s From my Homeland series, exploring and contextualising the Czech repertory, came to its conclusion with a daylong survey of composers associated with Terezín (Theresienstadt in German), the ghetto-camp set up by the Nazis near Prague, where many of the Czech-Jewish artistic community were held before transportation to Auschwitz, and where music, drama and literature flourished almost in defiance of the encompassing horror. The Nash gave us two concerts, late afternoon and evening, preceded by two films, Simon Broughton’s benchmark 1993 documentary The Music of Terezín, and his 2019 interview with the actor Zdenka Fantlová, who survived the Holocaust to bear witness to events in Terezín, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
In the wider context of a Czech retrospective, the day served in part as a reminder of musical traditions both undermined and fiercely re-asserted. The main composers of Terezín – Hans Krása, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas and Gideon Klein – were the musical heirs and successors of Smetana and Janáček, and Smetana’s pioneering 1855 Piano Trio in G Minor was placed during the evening concert alongside Ullmann’s Third String Quartet, written in Terezín in 1943, which casts aside modernism (Ullmann studied with Schoenberg) in a return to Czech folk music as inspiration. The main work of the afternoon concert, Pavel Haas’s Second String Quartet, written in 1925, gradually takes the language of his teacher Janáček into gritty, dissonant territory close to expressionism, throwing us off balance by the addition of percussion (and with it a fifth player) in the final movement. The piece is too long for its own good, though the performance, focused, detailed and exuberant, was terrific.
Elsewhere, an uncompromising, at times angry bearing of witness alternated with nostalgia, humour and yearning for escape. Krása’s Tanec (Dance) for String Trio whirls and rages like some bitter danse macabre while František Domažlický’s Song Without Words for string quartet hankers after an already lost world of salon elegance and sentimentality. A suite arranged by David Matthews from Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár, the most frequently performed work in Terezín, ended the day with a blaze of defiant humour and some wonderfully breezy playing, though the emotional climax came earlier on, with a group of songs written in the camp and sung with extraordinary directness by the outstanding baritone Konstantin Krimmel. Ullmann’s sad reflections in Yiddish, contrasted with Adolf Strauss’s Ich Weiss Bestimmt, Ich Werd’ Dich Wiedersehen, which could almost have come from a Broadway musical. Ilse Weber, meanwhile, was a great singer-songwriter: her Ade Kamerad!, in which friends say goodbye before transportation to Poland, just tears you in two. An unforgettable day, every second of it. The concerts, meanwhile, were live-streamed and are now available on the Wigmore Hall site. They really are essential viewing.