Music from the Time of Anne Frank
Eleonore Pameijer (flute) & Marcel Worms (piano)

Programme

Dick Kattenburg (1919 - 1943) Sonata for flute and piano (1937)

• Introduzione: Maestoso
• Intermezzo: Andante quasi lento
• Fughetta: Allegro vivo

Rosy Wertheim (1888-1949) Three Pieces for flute and piano (1939)

• Cortège des marionnettes
• Pastorale
• Capriccio

Nico Richter (1915-1945) Two pieces for flute and piano (1942)

• Allegretto
• Adagio

Bob Hanf (1894-1944) Little Suite for flute and piano

• Prelude
• Tempo di Marcia
• Waltz
• Epilogue

Jeff Hamburg (1956) Uncle Mendel's Ukranian Blues (1999)

Ignace Lilien ( Lviv 1897-1964)Divertimento for flute and piano (1950)

• Incantazione
• Allegro capriccioso
• Canción
• Passacaglia

Music from the Time of Anne Frank

There was a very lively cultural scene in Amsterdam in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Many of its active participants were Jews, some of them Amsterdam born, others had moved to the city in the thirties escaping the upcoming violence in Germany. During the war, all art forms, including music, had to fit the tight rules of the invader and after the war it became clear that only few of the many Jewish artists had survived the Holocaust.

Music from the time of Anne Frank is not a sad account of what could have been, but a positive testimony of a time that was. The music does not mourn a vanished world but paints a vivid picture of an intensive period in Dutch-Jewish history and is a rare opportunity to get acquainted with some excellent music, placed in its rich context. A new composition by a Jewish contemporary composer, Jeff Hamburg, will also be performed in order to give the program a contemporary perspective. All pieces are chosen for their musical and esthetic qualities.

Eleonore Pameijer and Marcel Worms are playing together since 1999. In 1996 Eleonore Pameijer started the Leo Smit Foundation (www.leosmit.nl), named after the Dutch composer Leo Smit, who was born in 1900 en killed in a concentration camp in 1943. The Foundation brings music by forgotten composers (mainly nazi victims) back to the public through concerts, recordings and publications. Some years later Marcel Worms joined her in researching and performing music by composers who were killed in the nazi camps.

BIOGRAPHIES

DICK KATTENBURG

The manuscript of the Flute Sonata by Dick Kattenburg was send to flutist Eleonore Pameijer on her birthday five years ago. The sender of the Kattenburg manuscript is Ima Spanjaard-van Esso, the mother of the well-known Dutch conductor Ed Spanjaard. When Ima van Esso was a young girl she played the flute and 19-year old composer Dick Kattenburg was impressed with her playing. He wrote a Flute Sonata for her. When the war broke out in 1940 both Ima van Esso and Dick Kattenburg were send to concentration camps because of they were jewish. Ima survived Auschwitz, she played the flute in the camp and was saved that way. Dick Kattenburg didn't survive. According to Ima his Flute Sonata is a musical love letter.

ROSY WERTHEIM

Rosy Wertheim was born into a family of Jewish bankers in Amsterdam. After high school, her parents sent her to boarding school in Switzerland. Inspired by the excellent piano lessons she received, she decided to become a pianist and a composer. In 1929, she moved to Paris to study for six moths. Once there, she had contact with Louis Aubert and Elsa Barraine and the six months turned into six years. In 1935, Rosy Wertheim left for Vienna, in 1936 for New York and in 1937 she returned to Amsterdam.

During the war, she went into hiding, all her belongings including her grand piano were stolen from her by the nazis and her composing came to an end. Shortly after the liberation she fell ill and in 1949 she died.

Her earliest works are written in a romantic style, but in the thirties she developed a sober, modern language of which the Three Pieces from 1939 are a good example.

LEO SMIT

Leo Smit was born into a Dutch-Jewish family in Amsterdam. He studied piano and composition and was the conservatory's first composition student to graduate cum laude (1924). His composition Silhouetten was performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Cornelius Dopper in 1925. In 1927 Leo Smit and his wife left for Paris,where they lived for 7 years. His compositions were performed by leading musicians and conductors:. the ballet Schemselnihar was performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteux in 1929. In 1934, Eduard van Beinum and the Concertgebouw Orchestra performed his Concertino for Harp and Orchestra.Leo Smit returned to Amsterdam in 1937. There he composed a.o. his Trio for clarinet, viola and piano (1938), the Viola Concerto (1940) and his Divertimento for piano four hands (1940).

After the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, it became more and more difficult for jews to get their music performed as the Nazis banned all Jewish artists from public life.

The Flute Sonata (february1943) is his last composition.

Leo Smit was arrested on March 25, 1943 together with his wife. He was deported on April 27 to Sobibor, where he was murdered on April 30, 1943.

NICO RICHTER

Nico Richter was born in Amsterdam in 1915, into a non-relegious jewish family. He studied violin, composition and he also took conducting lessons with the famous conductor Hermann Scherchen, a well-known promotor for new music. As a medical student he studied at Amsteram University.

In 1940 Richter married violinist Hetta Scheffer. In 1941 he received his medical degree. After the Nazi's invaded the Netherlands, Nico Richter took part in the resistance movement. He was arrested in 1942 and send to concentration camp Vught and later to concentration camp Dachau.

He returned from the camps, but his health was completely destroyed and he died a couple of months later. His compositions are very clear and intense and usually very short, in a style that reminds us of Anton Webern and Alban Berg.

BOB HANF

Bob Hanf was a many-talented artist whose oeuvre contains drawings and paintings as well as poems, plays, songs and chamber music. His father lived in Germany but settled as a banker in Amsterdam. His mother, Laura Romberg, was an excellent pianist. She gave her son his first music lessons. Hanf gave very interesting lectures on modern art and organised several expositions celebrating painters like Vassily Kandinsky. Around 1920, he produced many drawings in a German expressionistic style similiar to Beckman, a style later referred to by the Nazis as Entartete Kunst.

Hanf studied chemistry in Delft. The Dutch writer Simon Vestdijk was greatly impressed by Hanf's personality. Hanf inspired Vestdijk to read German literature and introduced him to Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry. At the age of 27, Bob Hanf decided to become a violinist. He studied with Louis Zimmerman and took composition lessons with Cornelis Dopper. As a composer, Hanf wrote a small but very elegant oeuvre of songs and chamber music. In 1944, Bob Hanf was murdered in Auschwitz.

JEFF HAMBURG

Jeff Hamburg, born in Philadelphia, has been a successful composer based in the Netherlands since 1979. Perfomances of his music in the last few years include premieres in the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam to recordings made by the BBC.Hamburg studied acoustics and composition at the University of Illinois (BM), continuing his studies at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague (the Netherlands) with Louis Andriessen. He received the Conservatory Prize in 1986. Hamburg was commisioned by major orchestras and ensembles in the Netherlands, the USA and Australia. The North Holland Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by David Porcelijn has released a CD on the Composers Voice label with four of Hamburg's orchestral compositions. Several other CD's of his music are available.

In June 2003 Hamburg was awarded the prestigeous Visser-Neerlandia Music Prize. Uncle Mendel’s Ukranian Blues was written for Marcel Worms. It is an hommage to Hamburg’s family, who lived in the Ukraine till 1911 (in Koshevata and Haysin, between Kiev and Odessa).

IGNACE LILIEN

Ignace Lilien was born in Lviv. Under the hegemony of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, the Jewish population prospered in this city often referred to as 'Little Vienna'. In 1914, Ignace Lilien came to the Netherlands, while making a bicycle-tour to see museums across Europe. His visit coincided with the outbreak ofthe First World War. Lilien decided to stay in Holland and studied chemistry at Delft University. Although Lilien earned his living as a chemical engineer, he was a brilliant composer and pianist.During the 1930’s, Lilien lived in the Bohemian city of Reichenberg (Liberec) where he composed the 'Modern Times Sonata' for violin and piano in 1935. In 1939, Lilien returned to the Netherlands. He spent the war years in hiding, surviving the German occupation. Between 1939 and 1943 he composed a great number of songs on Dutch texts. In his song cycle 'Maria Lecina', Lilien shows his love for Spanish rhythms and passionate singing. The 'Ballade van Westerbork' is a realistic and sober setting of his own poems depicting the deportation of Jewish children from Westerbork to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. After the war, Lilien went to South-America as a concert pianist. In Lima (Peru) he composed the Divertimento for flute and piano in 1950. Ignace Lilien died in 1964 in The Hague.

THE DUO

In 2002, the flutist Eleonore Pameijer and pianist Marcel Worms began an intensive collaboration. The versatile duo has already given countless concerts throughout the world. The duo has toured the United States, Israel, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Slovenia and India. The two musicians perform classical recitals while a program of works by Jewish composers, such as Smit, Schulhoff, Kattenburg, Wertheim, Richter and Belinfante is also part of their repertoire. Their large-scale Six Continents Project, a project which weighs musical globalization against cultural diversity, has also been performed worldwide. Composers from six continents have composed works for flute and piano for this project; works that in one way or another resonate with their own, individual cultural background. Pieces have come from Brazil, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Australia, China, Suriname, Japan, the United States, and the Netherlands. UNESCO, in honor of their 60th anniversary, will present a CD of Six Continents in 2006 (Future Classics 061).

ELEONORE PAMEIJER

Eleonore Pameijer studied flute with Koos Verheul at the Amsterdam Conservatory where she received her solo diploma cum laude. She continued her studies with Sue Ann Kahn at Bennington College (Vermont, U.S.A.), also following master classes with Julius Baker, Samuel Baron, Harvey Sollberger and the legendary French flutist Marcel Moyse. After returning to Europe, she studied flute with Severino Gazzeloni at the Academia Chigiana (Italy). She followed special courses for Baroque Music with Jos van Immerseel, Bart Kuyken and Ton Koopman.

In 1984 she gave her debut recital in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and was prize winner of the Frank Martincompetition. She appeared on Dutch National Television in a program featuring 'young soloists of the year'. In 1985, she became principal flutist of the ASKO/Schönberg-ensemble, one of the leading 20th century music ensembles in Europe.

Eleonore Pameijer has performed as soloist with many orchestras and ensembles lead by conductors as David Porcelijn, Richard Duffalo, Ton Koopman, Oliver Knussen, Ingo Metzmacher, Peter Eötvös, Philippe Entremont, Kenneth Montgomery and Alexander Vedernikov. She has also contributed her soloistic capacities to many Holland Festival productions, performing as well in almost every European country, Canada and the USA.

Numerous compositions have been written especially for her, including many Flute Concerto's. Dutch publishing house Donemus published two books with solo flute repertoire all composed for Eleonore Pameijer. In 1996 she took the initiative in establishing the Leo Smit Foundation, dedicated to promoting music by 'forgotten jewish composers' from the first half of the 20th century. This foundation organises monthly concerts and radiorecordings in the Uilenburger Synagogue in Amsterdam.

Eleonore Pameijer has made many radio and television recordings as well as a large number of CDs.

More information: www.eleonorepameijer.nl/www.futureclassics.nl

MARCEL WORMS

Marcel Worms (1951) studied piano at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam with Hans Dercksen and Alexandre Hrisanide.

After his graduation in 1987, he specialised in 20th-century piano music.

He premiered early piano works of Arnold Schoenberg at the 'IJsbreker', center of modern music in Amsterdam and performed the complete piano works of Leos Janácek (including a four-hand piece that he discovered in Brno). His program Jazz in 20th-Century Piano Music, launched in the 1992/93 season, was broadcast by Dutch radio and subsequently released on CD by the Dutch label BVHAAST. As a result, Marcel Worms was invited to play this program in many European countries, North America, Russia, South Africa and Indonesia. He performed this program in New York and Washington D.C. in 1994 and returned to the US for recitals since then almost every year.

In the 1994/95 season, Marcel Worms created a program entitled Mondrian and the Music of his Time, commemorating Mondrian's death 50 years earlier. This program was performed in many European countries and the USA. The Washington Post wrote about the concert in the National Gallery of Art in Washington: All this was virtuoso fare and Worms played it with joy, grace and, at times, humour that was contagious and captivating. In 1996, he played this program in the Hermitage Theater in St.Petersburg and in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. A CD of this program has been released for Emergo Classics.

A CD with the complete music for piano and wind instruments by Francis Poulenc has also been released on the same label. A CD with piano music by Jean Wiéner has been released in 1996 for the BVHAAST label.

His program Blues for Piano was initiated in 1997. More than 160 new Blues have been composed for this project, written by composers from 45 different countries around the world.

This project was brought to Moscow in 1997 and to Beijing and Shanghai in 1998. In 1999, Marcel Worms performed at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Hague, in 2000 at the Festival of Flandria, in 2001 at the Warsaw Autumn Festival and in 2002 at the EU Jazz Festival in Mexico City. In 2004 he performed in the Fajr Festival in Iran and in 2005 in the Tblisi Autumn Festival in Georgia.

In the 1998-1999 season, Marcel Worms researched Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso and their relation to music. Both projects resulted in CD recordings.

In 2002, Marcel Worms focussed on the piano works of the Spanish composer Federico Mompou. A Tango program, o.a. performed in China and Argentina, resulted in a CD with Tangos for Piano in 2002. Marcel Worms is a regular guest on Dutch radio and television stations.

More information at www.marcelworms.com