Tanglewood
Studio E, Linde Center for Music and Learning, Lenox/Stockbridge, MA
Join us for a community commemoration of Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day – featuring the film Defiant Requiem, a performance by renowned violinist Yevgeny Kutik, a memorial candle lighting, prayers, and a moment of silence in memory of those murdered in the Holocaust.
Co-sponsored by Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and the Tanglewood Learning Institute.
More about Defiant Requiem
Premiered at Yad Vashem in 2012, the award-winning documentary film, Defiant Requiem, tells the extraordinary, little-known story of conductor Rafael Schächter and his Theresienstadt (Terezín) Concentration Camp prisoner choir who performed Verdi’s Requiem Mass 16 times as an act of defiance and resistance against their Nazi captors. The text of the Mass enabled them, as Schächter told the chorus, to “sing to the Nazis what they could not say to them.” With testimony from surviving members of Schächter’s choir, soaring concert footage, cinematic dramatizations, and evocative animation, this unique film explores how a rare form of courage sparked compelling determination to survive by answering the worst of mankind with the best of mankind. Defiant Requiem is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two News and Documentary Emmy® Award nominations, and has been broadcast on PBS, BBC4, France Télévisions, Globostat (Brazil), and in Hungary and Israel.
More about Yevgeny Kutik
Joining us to perform the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004, is internationally renowned violinist Yevgeny Kutik, who has been praised for his technical precision and virtuosity, and lauded for his poetic and imaginative interpretations of standard works as well as rarely heard and newly composed repertoire. A native of Minsk, Belarus, Kutik immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of five. Passionate about his heritage and its influence on his artistry, Kutik is an advocate for the Jewish Federations of North America, the organization that assisted his family in coming to the United States, and regularly speaks and performs across the United States to both raise awareness and promote the assistance of refugees from around the world. Yevgeny Kutik most recently performed for the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires as part of their Community Gathering in Commemoration of October 7th last fall.
