CULTURE Music from Women Composers to Commemorate the Holocaust

By Adam Smulevich

The concert “Libero è il mio canto” (in English “My Song is Free”) will be the first of many initiatives organized for Holocaust Remembrance Day by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities with the support of the presidency of the Council of Ministers. The concert will feature music composed in the period between 1933 and 1953 by women in ghettos, Nazi camps, Russian gulags, Italian and Japanese camps and Zigeunerblock for Roma and were collected by composer and pianist Francesco Lotoro over years of study and research.

Eighteen pieces will be performed in the concert, scheduled for the evening of January 16 in Rome. The guest star for the evening will be the singer Aviva Bar-On, who as a child was deported to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt and managed to survive.

According to the organizers Viviana Kasam and Marilena Citelli Francese the event will represent “a moving and unprecedented page in the history of music, which will bear witness to the extraordinary artistic talent of women in the field of musical composition, in which women are practically absent”. In a world in which “racism, chauvinism and fear of the other have made a comeback, it is important to give voice to the values of humanism, acceptance, love and empathy which distinguishes the female universe”, they added.