On Sale Soon: Out of the Shadows – Leeds and York Festival – June 2016

2 Cities, 8 venues, 17 performances, 23 days!

The Leeds and York festival programme is now complete with a wide array of concerts, theatre performances and talks presenting the findings and work of the Performing the Jewish Archive project. The festival will include premiere performances of rediscovered creations by artists in internment, exile or migration in the twentieth century.

As a pre-festival preview event, we are very excited to be performing The Smoke of Home on 16 and 17 April 2016. This will be the first ever public performance held in York’s iconic Clifford’s Tower. The Smoke of Home is a recently rediscovered one-act play written in the Terezín ghetto. The Festival’s launch event will take place on Wednesday 1 June in Leeds with a performance by the Cassia String Quartet. Using actors and live music, this presentation will offer an intimate, moving, and occasionally humorous portrait of the Czech-born composer and pianist, Gideon Klein, who was tragically murdered at the age of 25 in Auschwitz. On Wednesday 8 June the acclaimed Nash Ensemble will present music from the Terezín ghetto by Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullman, and Hans Krása, alongside Smetana’s Bartered Bride overture, at the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds.

Other festival highlights will include Mother Rachel and Her Children, a long-lost oratorio by Helsinki-born Jac Weinstein; Clothworkers Consort of Leeds performing the music of Hans Gál; a concert of music for piano and cello including the European premiere of piano pieces by 12-year-old prodigy Josima Feldschuh who perished in Warsaw; and a cabaret performance by Chicago based group, The New Budapest Orpheum Society.

Full details of all the performances in the Leeds and York Festival will be released at the end of January.