Ute Lemper - "Main Zawoe"

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Piano: Francesco Lotoro
Bass: Guiseppe Bassi
Bandoneon: Victor Villena
Violin: Daniel Hoffman
Clarinet: Andre Campanella

Concert filmed by RAI in Mantova, Italy

"Main Zawoe"
Written by Johanna Spector & Jasha Rabinowitz (poem)
This fragment was written in 1944 in the labor camp of Latvia. Jasha Rabinowitz was shot dead by the German Nazis on May 3rd 1945 two hours before the liberation by the British Army and only 5 days before the end of the war.
JOHANNA SPECTOR was the only one of her family to survive the Nazi Holocaust after being in a series of concentration camps. She immigrated after the war to the States and decided to devote herself to the studies of Jewish music. She earned her doctorate from Hebrew Union College and Columbia University . As a University professor she spent her life teaching about the ancient cultures of non western Jewish communities and their music.

"Especially as a postwar German native, married to a Jewish man here in NY since 20 years, I am eternally sensitive and tortured by the history of the Holocaust. It is my responsibility and utmost ethical longing to honor the culture of the Jewish people and stimulate the dialog about the terrible past . This is a mission that I have adopted already in 1987 when I became the protagonist of the big recordings series on DECCA "Entartete Music" that presented the Jewish composers and their music catalog banned by the Nazies. With SONGS FOR ETERNITY this mission continues and finds its most touching extension.

I am overwhelmed by the stories behind each of the songs. I studied a most unique book, a song collection by Vevel Pasternak from 1948, that gathers heartbreaking songs from the Ghettos and Concentration Camps as well as the songbook of Ilse Weber, finally published by her husband in Israel in the 90s long after he survived Auschwitz. Both music collections were given to me by my dear friend Orly Beigel who is half Mexican, half Israeli and a child of a Holocaust Survivor.

In 2015 I met Francesco Lotoro in Rome .He had dedicated many years to the research of music written in the concentration camps. It was an honor to present some of his collections with him playing the piano at our concerts." - Ute Lemper