About the concert

The thematic concert marking the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Portraits and Remembrance, is conceived as an analytical and performative contribution to contemporary understandings of musical creation under the extreme historical circumstances of the Second World War. Within this year’s Rosi Festival, the concert is positioned as a space of encounter between performance practice, musicological research, and critical reflection on the mechanisms of cultural memory and forgetting.

The program focuses on works by composers Ilse Weber, Henriëtte Bosmans and Rosy Wertheim, whose biographies and oeuvres were directly shaped by wartime experiences, persecution, and institutional exclusion. Their works are not united by a single stylistic paradigm, but rather by a shared context of disrupted reception and fragmented presence within the music-historical narrative. In this way, the program opens questions concerning the relationship between historical circumstances, gender, and the formation of the musical canon.

An analysis of the selected compositions reveals a variety of compositional strategies: from late-Romantic and Impressionist vocal lyricism, through neoclassical and modal elements, to simple, almost documentary musical forms that function in close relation to the text. In certain works, a conscious renunciation of stylistic development in favor of communicativeness and immediacy can be observed, which may be interpreted both as an aesthetic response to the conditions of their creation and as an ethical choice on the part of the composer.

A particular significance of the program lies in the performance of works reconstructed on the basis of surviving manuscripts, giving the concert the character of an exploratory and revisionist practice. Such an approach contributes to the expansion of the repertoire and enables the reintegration of marginalized oeuvres into contemporary concert life—not merely through an act of commemoration, but through active artistic and scholarly reception.

In this sense, the concert Portraits and Remembrance does not treat the Holocaust as a narrative framework, but as a historical context that profoundly affected the trajectories of musical production, reception, and the transmission of knowledge. The program affirms the Rosi Festival’s commitment to a thoughtful integration of artistic excellence, musicological reflection, and a responsible engagement with the cultural heritage of the twentieth century.