CD gives musical voice to children of Terezin concentration camp

SALVATORE CAPUTO
Special to Jewish News

At best, art and commerce co-exist in an uneasy truce, but mostly their goals are in conflict. Take the case of "Innocent Voices: The Verse of Terezin's Children."

On this compact disc, contemporary American composer John Federico has set to music poems by children held in the "model" Theresienstadt concentration camp in Terezin, Czechoslovakia.

There is redemptive power in the children's words and in Federico's sensitive, spare musical settings (often just piano and voices). Most of the poems are turned into songs; some are read to musical accompaniment.

The children faced their persecution with an indomitable spirit, even serving up some humor and wry satire in poems such as "The Little Mouse" and "View From the Coffee House," which Federico has transformed into lively tunes.

So, despite the melancholy that surrounds the project's origins, the children's general hopefulness makes for a CD that affirms life. Still, that wasn't enough positivity for a major record label.

Joe Ferry, the album's producer, is a music-business veteran with five Grammy nominations under his belt, and he shopped the project around to labels he'd worked with before.

"The first label accepted it," says executive producer Michael Mirtsopoulos, "but their first comment was that they wanted to make the songs a little more happy."

He pauses in incredulity that anyone could make a suggestion so counter to the spirit of the CD.

"Right away when I heard that, I sat down with Joe and offered to back the project myself, with a partner, so that we could maintain the integrity and the spirituality of the project," Mirtsopoulos continues.

Thus, they formed Lost Planet Records for the sole purpose of marketing and distributing the album.

The CD is available through Borders Books & Music nationally and through such local independent venues as The Israel Connection and Scottsdale Judaica. (To find the nearest vendor, call Lost Planet's toll-free number, 1-888-640-5678.)

Mirtsopoulos, Ferry and Federico first met at a course on the music business that Ferry was teaching at the State University of New York College at Purchase about a year ago.

Federico had heard cantor Ray Smolover's setting of an anonymous poem, "Birdsong," and was moved by it. Federico wrote a choral arrangement for "Birdsong" and that led him to consider writing original music to some other poems from the children of Terezin. Smolover became a consultant on the project.

Ferry, for his part, was interested in the project because he had wanted to make a children's record for some time.

Making the album involved consulting with Terezin survivors and conducting extensive research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Museum in Prague before the music could be recorded. Even so, the team moved quickly and was in the studio last June recording the music. The album was released in September.

"There always seemed to be a magic around this project," Mirtsopoulos says, adding that many doors opened and coincidences occurred that allowed the group to move along quickly in its creative effort.

In addition to the Terezin poems, which come from two books - "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" (Schoken Books Inc., N.Y. 1993) and "Vedem: We Are Children Just the Same" (The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia 1995) - Federico wrote a new arrangement of "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny." The song, written in 1878 by African-American composer James Bland, was a favorite memory of one of Terezin's child survivors.

She told Federico that a young girl with a guitar would stand outside her barracks every evening at dusk and sing the song in "beautiful" English: "We looked forward to this every day because this song gave to us a sense of freedom ... a sense of going home, and made us think of the United States of America, which to us, represented the land of freedom."

Federico chose to close the album with a long, emotional composition that comprises two Terezin verses - the hopeful "With You, Mother" and the desolate "Faith in Nothing" - and "Hatikvah," an 1878 song that affirms "our hope is not yet lost."

The entire recording process was raw with emotion.

"A good example of that was when we were first recording 'A Letter to Daddy'," Mirtsopoulos says. "Here's four big guys sitting in the studio, while Lauren Stauber is singing this piece that a child wrote to her father in the concentration camp. She broke down while singing it, and we were almost gone too. It was a wrenching, very emotional experience."

He also was moved by the way the children who sang on the record responded to the poems. "Their insight and clarity, and their ability to see and feel the poems through the music was pretty profound."