Paul Schoenfield: Camp Songs; Ghetto Songs; Gerard Schwarz: Rudolf and Jeanette

American composer and pianist Paul Schoenfield is at the keyboard for two searing, heart-piercing works commissioned by Music of Remembrance. Schoenfield gives voice to the words of two brilliant poets—one a Holocaust survivor, one murdered—and the range of their emotions through rage, bitter humor, tenderness and fragile hope. This first English-language recording of his Camp Songs (a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist) joins his newest song cycle Ghetto Songs—transporting listeners from the horrors of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin to life in the Kraków Ghetto. Gerard Schwarz’s Rudolf and Jeanette is a haunting, romantic chamber orchestra work evoking the life and love of the composer’s Viennese grandparents, who were killed by the Nazis. Produced by Music of Remembrance, a Seattle-based non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the precious cultural legacy of works created by musicians during the Holocaust, and to commissioning new works in memory of their spiritual resistance.