Anne Frank comes back to life in music
It's no surprise that Anne Frank remains a symbol of the humanity in all of us. What continues to startle, however, is how often we need to be reminded of that symbol or else forget it ever existed.
Sunday afternoon at The Orpheum, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Judith Forst teamed
in a performance of Oscar Morawetz's work From the Diary of Anne Frank.
Kazuyoshi Akiyama conducted the 19-minute work based on an excerpt of the diary kept by the young girl who hid with her family from the Nazis
in Amsterdam during the Second World War.
In Morawetz's selection, Anne laments the loss of her friend Lies and prays for her return. The balance between hope, terror and anguish is superbly handled by Morawetz's score which closely follows Anne's writing. Forst's reading was warmly textured and her dramatic
involvement complete.
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