Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne
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Liberovici on Primo Levi
March 18, 2011, 12:00 am
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DURING its recent fourth international symposium on aspects of Primo Levi’s memoirs of the Holocaust, the Italian composer Andrea Liberovici presented his multimedia performance, The Transparency of the Word, Cantata for Primo Levi.
Based on the poetry of Emilio Jona, it is an inspired work of spare intensity. A haunting, percussive score is played by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne on a dark stage while snatches of the poems and evocative visual images of concentration camps and other terrible scenes are projected on a large screen.
It is a deeply moving creation by a promising new musical voice.
In recent decades the books and tragic life story of Primo Levi have spread beyond his native Italy to a large international audience, exerting an enormous cultural and psychological impact on our collective sense of memory.
A chemist by profession and a native of Torino, Levi has become one of the most prominent and respected chroniclers of the Holocaust. His famous account of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, has been translated to 24 languages. In it he recounts with penetrating clarity and descriptive precision the systematic degradation and loss of humanity suffered at the hands of the Nazi murders and torturers. His works have inspired generations to remember and discuss the causes and subsequent effects of this tragedy.
The Centro Primo Levi, housed in the moderate but impressive American Jewish History Center on West 16th Street, has honored its namesake in many ways and consistently offers a wide array of lectures and discussions relating to Italian Jewish Culture and history, as well as the universal themes of nationalism, fascist and totalitarian propaganda, oppression and the state of the humanities.
It shares the building, yet another New York cultural treasure with the formidable YIVO Yiddish research institute, the small, but extraordinarily representative Yeshiva University Museum, the Leo Baeck Institute devoted to German language, Jewish learning and Holocaust history, and the American Sephardi Federation.
15 Minutes Magazine - Liberovici on Primo Levi
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