The Likht Ensemble at the Leah Posluns Theatre

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It’s January which means Holocaust remembrance and, lest we forget, the Likht Ensemble are touring a programme drawn from the Shoah Songbook which they gave at the Leah Posluns Theatre in North York on Saturday evening.  I have written quite a lot about this ensemble and this project so it’s a challenge to find anything new to say but we can try.  FWIW previous related posts include:

For this year’s concert Jaclyn Grossman and Nate Ben-Horin were joined by violinist Daniel Temnik which certainly added some interesting colours to the vocal rep and allowed the inclusion of some instrumental works such as two polonaises by Szymon Laks arranged for violin and piano.  Then, of course, there were songs  from Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, the Vilna and Kovno ghettoes in Lithuania and the Łódź ghetto in Poland.  It’s mostly pretty depressing stuff of course but there’s also, inevitably, some pretty dark Jewish humour.  (Not though my second favourite song from Theresienstadt; Leo Straus’ Theresienstadt Questions which includes the immortal lines “Theresienstadt, Theresienstadt,The only ghetto with a Welcome Mat”.)  They did do my all time favourite Theresienstadt number Ilse Weber’s simple and very moving Ich Wandre Durch Theresienstadt. Besides this there were songs by trained composers and folkier pieces by other deportees.  It was a nice balance and owed a lot to Nate’s skilful arrangements.

The other change was the location.  This year we were at the rebuilt Leah Posluns Theatre at Prosserman JCC on Bathurst just south of the Arctic Circle.  It’s a lovely theatre and just the right size for a song recital.  What didn’t change was the quality of the performance.  Jaclyn (whose voice is sounding better than ever) and Nate own this music and we got nuanced, moving accounts of all the songs definitely enhanced by Daniel on violin.

The Shoah songbook will continue to evolve as more scaps of music show up in archives in Europe and among the vast quantity of scanned material in Washington DC so besides the very important commemorative function of these concerts there’s always the possibility of some new and exciting discovery.

There’s more Holocaust content here if you are interested in exploring further:

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