Ready to launch: Tickets for 'Out of the Shadows Festival' in Madison, Wisconsin on sale mid-January

The project team in Madison, Wisconsin is finalizing the events for “Out of the Shadows,” May 1 – 5, 2016, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the greater Madison, Wisconsin region.  After welcoming over 500 people to our one-day event last August, we look forward to presenting five days of music, theater, and literature that has been recently uncovered and newly interpreted. Putting together the various pieces from around the world has been an exciting challenge but one that each member in the team has risen to.

Each member of the international team will present research findings at the event by way of concerts, lectures, performances, talk-backs, new compositions, and an undergraduate symposium.  Our first day, Sunday, May 1, will feature a theatrical work, “Harlequin in the Ghetto,” based upon a cabaret-style play created in Terezenstadt and performed by theater students from Louisiana State University students; composer Victor Ullmann’s “The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke,” performed by the University of Chicago’s Phillip Bohlman and Christine Wilkie Bohlman; and a concert performed by the New Budapest Orpheum Society.

On Monday, May 2, we will hold a luncheon at the University Club, where Henry Sapoznik, executive director of the Mayrent Collection for Yiddish Culture, will deliver a talk about the recently discovered Lambert Cylinders.  That evening, the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society will hold a chamber music concert of European-Jewish composers who immigrated to the US.

Tuesday, May 3 brings another pair of concerts, “Wilhelm Grosz: Lieder and Piano Music” and “‘Oy, how he sung!’: Journeys in Jewish Choral Music,” featuring the migration of Russian-Jewish musicians and their music to Germany, the United States, Finland, and South Africa.

The festival will observe Yom Ha’Shoah beginning the evening of Wednesday, May 4, through Thursday, May 5. Wednesday begins with an undergraduate research symposium, “Holocaust: Literature, Music, Memory and Representation,” followed by a concert production of the oratorio, “Mother Rachel and Her Children.” This work, presented both in Yiddish and English, was written in Helsinki in 1948 and is one of the first extant musical pieces that commemorates the Holocaust.

The final day of our event, Thursday, May 4, presents a discourse of a “Portrait of Gideon Klein,” which is woven throughout a program of his music performed by the UW-Madison resident quartet, the Pro Arte Quartet.  A “Collage Concert” culminates the five-day series with a program that features the Pro Arte Quartet’s performance of Klein’s String Trio (1944), with appearances by internationally renowned soprano Elizabeth Hagedorn, pianist Zijin Yao, the Madison Youth Choir, and the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra.

These performances will be of wide interest to the community, and tickets will be available starting January 19 at http://www.uniontheater.wisc.edu.