"Elegies and Echoes" CD launch concert
Elizaveta Agrafenina, soprano
Dimitri Malignan, piano
with Floor Le Coultre & Kalle de Bie (cello)
Melodies by Mieczysław Weinberg, Ignace Lilien, Felix Blumenfeld, Samuil Feinberg and Henriëtte Bosmans.
Dedicated to bringing back to life the music of lesser-known and unjustifiably forgotten composers who, despite their huge and indisputable talent, are nowadays neglected because of historical and geopolitical reasons that had nothing to do with their musical abilities, "Elegies and Echoes" presents the works of four composers, born in Eastern Europe and of Jewish descent, who had to endure different shapes of persecution and threats during their lifetimes: Mieczysław Weinberg, Ignace Lilien, Felix Blumenfeld and Samuil Feinberg.
These composers have been selected as a symbolic representation of the past times which are forever gone, of these cities shattered and lives broken, where music is the only reminder of what has been. With very different and contrasted styles and characters, their works epitomize a journey through half a century of enormous hopes and irreparable losses. Through the prism of their eventful and sometimes tragic lives, their works belong to the “Past” as a geographic entity, as a homeland they had to leave behind and that is now forever gone, their music becoming simultaneously an elegy, and an echo, of these past times.
