This concert was the fourth, and perhaps most immediately relevant, in a series of concerts conceived over the past six years by artist-in-residence Christopher Latham for the Australian War Memorial. As with the Diggers’ Requiem (2018), Vietnam Requiem (2021), and the Prisoners of War Requiem (2022), Latham has created a narrative to accompany a series of musical works intended to make the history it explored ‘more conscious, identified and understood’.

This was, therefore, also a civic event, reflecting the broader statutory role of the Australian War Memorial as a preserver and propagator of Australia’s official war history. In case we were in any doubt about that aspect, the concert began with a pre-recorded introductory address from Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State the United States of America, standing with the seal of the US Department of State displayed prominently behind him.

As such, the event sits uncomfortably at best alongside the statement from MSO management only a few weeks earlier that ‘a concert platform is not an appropriate stage for political comment’.

As it quickly emerged, Blinken has strong personal reasons for providing an introduction to this event. The first half of the program was a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Third Symphony, Kaddish (1963), a work which includes a prominent role for a narrator. The original text was by Bernstein himself, which he revised in 1977, but another version by the New York lawyer, public servant, and Auschwitz survivor Samuel Pisar was created in 2003 to reframe the work as explicitly about the Holocaust. Pisar, who died in 2015, is Blinken’s stepfather; he also had, as Blinken informed us, a significant connection with Australia. Pisar’s path to both physical and psychological recovery began with his evacuation to Australia at the end of World War II. Graduating in law from the University of Melbourne in 1953, he then emigrated to New York where he befriended the young Leonard Bernstein.

Kaddish: A Holocaust Memorial Concert (photograph by Laura Manariti)

Here, the text was read (and read very well indeed) by Pisar’s daughter and Blinken’s half-sister Leah Pisar. It is a poetic and powerful personal testament that includes harrowing eyewitness descriptions of Auschwitz and the death of family members, as well as the author’s own struggle with survivor guilt and with faith itself. Samuel Pisar also turns his attention to contemporary political concerns, warning of the zealots who ‘dominate our public discourse’ and, presciently, noting that when ‘rampant economic and political upheaval unleash turmoil, insecurity and fear, populist folly empowers bloodthirsty leaders. This is how democracies perish and hunts for innocent scapegoats begin.’

Inevitably, this brings to mind the imminent US election, but Pisar’s narrative also denounces our ‘uncaring world’ in which ‘genocides and … ethnic cleansings… were and are acceptable – even to this day’. Thus it also seems to have something to say to us about the carnage currently unfolding in Gaza; a situation in which Blinken is one of the more consequential actors.

Bernstein underscores this potent narrative with angular, anguished, instrumental music that hints at West Side Story and On the Waterfront, as well as his own filtering of the neo-classical and serial music of Stravinsky (I was more than once reminded of the latter’s Symphony of Psalms in particular). For all its musical anguish, it is also surprisingly attractive, not least when, before the second invocation of the Kaddish itself, Bernstein composes an extended, tonal lullaby for soprano and harp (here performed by soprano Jessica Aszodi and MSO Harpist Yinuo Mu).

Bernstein recalled that at the work’s first performance critics were ‘all terribly excited’ until this point, when ‘they all threw up their hands in despair and said, oh, well, there it goes. That’s the end of that piece …’ He went on to explain that for him the apparent triumph of a more conventional musical language was to be understood as akin to the triumph of faith itself.

A significantly enlarged Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, well supported by the MSO Chorus and the Young Voices of Melbourne, gave a taut, impassioned rendering of this score under conductor Benjamin Northey. Choir and soloists were complemented by some judicious sound reinforcement.

The second half of the program unfolded as series of twelve Chapters followed by a Final Prayer, each section consisting of a piece of music (in many cases orchestrated by Latham himself) accompanied by text and historic images that were projected above the orchestra.

Despite Chairman of the Australian War Memorial Kim Beazley’s opening declaration that the audience were to be given a ‘true account of the Holocaust’, this performance of course made no pretence to proffer a comprehensive history of these uniquely horrendous events. Instead, the focus was on a few key historical events and on the many remarkable musicians who were interred at the Theresienstadt (Terezin) ghetto. The sequence ended with a brief look at some of the impressive and lasting contributions Jewish refugees made to postwar Australian cultural and intellectual life, set to music by George Dreyfus (‘Larino, Safe Haven’) written to honour the household in Balwyn that took him in when he arrived in Australia as a refugee in 1939.

For other Chapters, Latham was able to choose from musical works by composers who did not survive the Holocaust, but who in many cases were able to ensure (whether through good fortune or bravery) that at least some of their music did. In two particular instances – the chapters dealing with the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, and the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in 1944 – the choice of music must have been especially difficult. What sort of score can properly accompany the depiction of such events? Here I thought of Theodor Adorno’s oft-(mis)quoted observation that it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Adorno later qualified his remark by noting that ‘perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream’. In any event, Latham’s choices seemed here to be especially judicious: the song Unter dayne vayse shtern (‘Under your White Stars’, by Abraham Brudno, who was murdered in a German concentration camp in Estonia in 1943); and the second movement from Bela Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings, respectively.

Other works performed included the première of two effective Australian compositions that also seamlessly followed one another (reflecting, no doubt, the fact that the events that inspired them were also casually interlinked). Elena Kats-Chernin’s The Night of Broken Glass reworks the Prelude in E flat minor from J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I into a powerful lament (accompanied by wordless vocalising from Aszodi) for the events of Kristallnacht in 1938, when Nazi crowds attacked Jewish property and Jews themselves across the country. William Barton’s William Cooper March (which featured Barton himself on the yidaki) commemorates Yorta Yorta Elder William Cooper and his efforts to support the human rights of not just his own people through his Australian Aboriginal League, but also, after hearing of Kristallnacht, Germany’s Jews. Cooper’s life story should be much better known. One can only hope that this might also help encourage the Australian War Memorial to reconsider its long-standing refusal properly to recognise the status and significance of the frontier wars in our country’s history.

In several instances, performing works in orchestral arrangements by Lathan himself, the MSO again provided excellent support throughout. There were further appearances from Aszodi and the Young Voices of Melbourne, alongside harpist Alice Giles, and solos from violinist Emily Sun, who once again demonstrated what an accomplished and versatile artist she is.

Collectively, it added up to a powerful act of remembrance, a reminder to all present of our responsibility both to understand what led to such a ‘catastrophic failure of compassion’ (to quote the Director of the Australian War Memorial, Matt Anderson) and to do what we can to ensure it never happens again. In that respect, perhaps the one unexpectedly jarring note was when images from Chapter Nine (The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) appeared. The vistas we were shown of a devastated urban landscape had an uncanny similarity to those now regularly appearing on our television screens from Gaza. They inevitably brought to mind the injunction that Pisar’s narrative gave us in the first half of the concert that the ‘awesome’ legacy of the history of the Holocaust needed to remain in ‘the collective memory of future generations of all colours, races, and creeds, lest similar crimes destroy their world, as they once destroyed mine’.

I could imagine that, for some, the mere possibility of such a connection on such an occasion would not have been a welcome one. On the other hand, this is what great art in the service of any commemoration always does. It will not just reinforce our presumptions but also question them; not just comfort, but unsettle.

Kaddish: A Holocaust Memorial Concert was performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at Arts Centre Melbourne on 31 October 2024.