Rehearsals for the new program are already in full swing – a nice mix of favourite songs from our repertoire and completely new pieces. Some of them are quite ambitious. For a Dutch song, which we are rehearsing in anticipation for our choir‘s trip to Terschelling, we are singing with no less than four soprano voices, three alto voices, two tenor voices and bass! A wonderful tapestry of sound that is incredibly demanding for the individual voice groups. But working on it, listening to it, listening to each other, developing the sound and our hearing is an exciting process of growing together as a choir.
Some pieces are specially arranged for our choir and are special highlights – for example, a world-famous Ukrainian pop song about war and the hope for peace is turned into a jazzy and moving choir song.
One of the new songs presents perhaps the greatest challenge: To mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the choir has decided to sing a piece by the Czech resistance fighter and music teacher Ludmilla Peškařová, who was interned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp (Fürstenberg an der Havel, Brandenburg). Singing, music, poetry and composing in the camp, in the face of forced labour, violence, murder and hunger, was resistance, courage and strength for her. In the first months of 1945, the conditions in the camp were desperate – it was completely overcrowded and lacked all the necessities of life. There was never enough food in the camps to begin with, but now it was no longer enough just to survive. Gas chambers were put into operation and women were “selected” almost daily. Everyone lived in a state of mortal fear and complete exhaustion. In the final weeks before liberation, the hardship intensified, but so did hope. Ludmilla Peškařová experienced this time in a kind of trance. Almost starved and weakened to death, she had a moving vision – she saw and heard a choir of women from Ravensbrück, still shackled and written off as dead, joining in a powerful choral for their liberation.
Survivors and the dead, women but also men from the nearby men’s camp, sing of their longing for home, but also appeal to the younger generation to honour the lives of all people, to avoid war and to realise the hope for a better world. You can tell that the chorale was composed in an extreme situation – it is full of furrows, cracks and stumbling blocks. Our choirmaster Eugen Zigutkin has arranged it very sensitively and faithfully for four voices, actively supported by a Czech speaker in our choir with the text notation and translation. It is a great honour for us to sing this “Choir of a Thousand Voices” – especially this year.