A full house gathered in the Hart Community Centre to witness a moving Prince George Symphony Orchestra (PGSO) performance of Different Trains in honour of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“It’s a very powerful piece and we are so grateful that so many of you have come out for this ground-breaking performance,” said Eli Klasner, Executive Director of the Prince George Community Arts Council and a member of the Prince George Jewish community.
“Many Jewish organizations and Holocaust Education centres across Canada have taken note that this relatively little community in a relatively remote part of Canada has taken such as bold and courageous step, and a creative step, to recognize International Holocaust Remembrance Day.”
Different Trains is a string quartet with pre-recorded tape by noted American Jewish composer Steve Reich, which won the 1989 Grammy award for Best Contemporary Composition.
It’s based on the memory of Reich who, as a young child, travelled back and forth between Los Angeles and New York by train from 1939 to 1942.
He said if he had been in Europe at that same time period, as a Jew, he would have had to ride a very different train.
The piece itself is quite a feat to perform and requires the assistance of an audio technician and PGSO’s Executive Director Ken Hall said it is almost a career defining opportunity to play.
“It's exciting to have an opportunity to mark World Holocaust Remembrance Day,” said Hall.
“It's something that I've personally been involved with, I used to work with a children's opera company in Toronto, and we did a performance of little children's opera called Brundibar which was actually performed in one of the camps.”
Hall said the company had the opportunity to work with a survivor from the camps, and they took the children to Europe to perform the opera where they met members of the original cast who performed in the camp.
“It was just an astonishing, really life-changing kind of experience and in a small way, it's nice to see that in this community as well,” said Hall.
“Especially with news coming out about residential schools and things that are happening in Ukraine, it's relevant. There’s another wave of antisemitism in North America and Europe, so it feels relevant and it feels important. It's nice to do something with the symphony that really challenges the community and feels important artistically.”
Klasner said you could hear a pin drop during the adventurous performance, and the musicians put so much of their heart into it that he was moved to tears.
“It's about fighting oppression. It's about fighting tyranny. It's about saying, never again, to what happened in the Holocaust, which was state sponsored mechanized industrial approach to annihilation about a certain a certain group of people,” said Klasner.
“I think a lot of people were really moved. And again, it's an adventurous piece, It's not something typical audiences might hear on a weekly basis, but I think I think the audience enjoyed it.”
Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on Jan. 27 each year, marking the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by Allied forces.
