City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Gražinytė-Tyla

An ocean liner on its way to Brazil at the end of the 1950s: in Mieczysław Weinberg's opera »The Passenger«, Martha, a former concentration camp guard, is caught up in the past. 15 years after the war, she meets Lisa on the ship, who unexpectedly survived the concentration camp. While they dance on board, flashbacks evoke the horrors of camp life.

Masterpiece of recent opera history
Weinberg, born in Warsaw in 1919, lost his entire family in the Holocaust. He managed to save himself by fleeing to the Soviet Union. There he found an artistic advocate in Dmitri Shostakovich and a defender against arbitrary state violence. Shostakovich also supported Weinberg's opera »The Passenger«, completed in 1968, which he considered to be a masterpiece. However, despite all his efforts, its performance failed due to censorship and was not premiered until 2010 in Bregenz. Weinberg not only quotes Johann Sebastian Bach's Chaconne for solo violin, for example, but also incorporates elements of folk music, jazz and atonality in equal measure. Shostakovich summarises: »I understand 'The Passenger' as a hymn to the people who stood up to the most terrible evil in the world, fascism.«

Musical memorial
The City of Birmingham Orchestra & Choir, conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, will now perform this masterpiece of recent opera history in concert with a number of exceptional soloists in German, Polish, Czech, Yiddish, French and English – - a musical memorial to the crimes of the Holocaust.