Helène Berr was a student at the Sorbonne in the 1940s.  She was musical, well read and kept a journal.  One looks at her photograph and one sees exactly what one expects; regular features, not too much makeup, nicely cut hair.  All in all a typical young middle class Parisienne of the period.  But she was Jewish and, ultimately deported to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where she was killed just days before British troops liberated the camp on 15th April 1945.

Extracts from her journal, which chronicles both her personal life and the deepening repression of French jewry under German occupation, have been arranged into a narrative and set to music by Bernard Foccroulle.  It’s scored for voice and string quintet and the first of three performances during the 21C festival took place in Mazzoleni Hall on Tuesday evening.  The journal is in French, of course, except where it quotes poetry in English or German.  Some of it is spoken (in English translation); often with background musical accompaniment, and some of it is sung (in the original language with English surtitles).  The musical accompaniment seems to me to have two gears.  When it’s dealing with narrative it’s mostly modern and quite thin textured; piano alone, pizzicato strings, disjointed phrases, but when it’s setting 19th century poetry or the references are to the 19th century romantic classics that Helène and her friends loved to play it becomes richer and more lyrical.  The contrast is very effective.

The soloist is soprano Elena Howard-Scott who handles the spoken text with feeling and sings beautifully in three languages.  Accompanying her are Stéphane Mayer on piano, Byungchan Lee and Daria Schibitcaia on violins, Hezekiah Leung on viola and Peter Eom on cello.  They are excellent.  It’s not an easy piece to perform and it’s not an easy piece to listen to but it is effective.  Some things need to be remembered.  Especially now.

There are further performances on Wednesday night at 7.30pm and Thursday afternoon at 3pm.