‘A real rag-bag of music’

Ars Choralis, an ensemble based in New York’s Hudson Valley, will recreate a performance of the Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau in Manhattan next week. Andrea Barrist Stern

On March 28, concert-goers will have a rare and heart-wrenching treat — they will hear an orchestra of wraiths, channeled, in a sense, by the choral ensemble Ars Choralis and a small group of instrumentalists.

With what may seem like a hodgepodge of instruments, mirroring those available in the concentration camps, Ars Choralis will perform “Music in Desperate Times: Remembering The Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau,” at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Using violins, mandolins, an accordion, a recorder, a flute, a cello, a piano, and various percussion pieces, they will perform — in arrangements adapted to their limited instrumentation — such classical standards as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mendelssohn’s First Violin Concerto.

Alice Radosh, project director for “Music in Desperate Times,” explained in a telephone interview Sunday from her Hudson Valley home that the Birkenau women would take delight in playing “the music of Mendelssohn without announcing it was by a Jewish composer. They also played Jewish folk music that the Jews in the camp would recognize but the SS would not.”

“There is such a disconnect,” she added, “between the horror [of the camp] and the beauty of the music.”

Both the channeling and the “disconnect” will be visual as well as auditory. The performers will wear lavender head-scarves and white blouses like those worn by the original musicians — which should make a startling contrast with the venue. The exquisitely appointed St. John’s, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, is an eternity away from where the original orchestra was condemned to play.

“The women at Birkenau were mostly sent to the gas chambers,” Radoff noted, “but if you held an instrument” when you were getting off the train to the camp, you could get assigned to the orchestra. It was “in existence for about 18 months,” she continued, “and every single one of the 54 women in it lived, except for the conductor, Alma Rosé,” who died in unclear circumstances. “Their lives were saved because they made beautiful music,” Radosh said. “They had to perform for the murderers, and when the transport trains came in, to keep people quiet.”

Barbara Pickhardt, the artistic director and conductor of “Music in Desperate Times,” conceived the project after reading about Alma Rosé — who was the renowned conductor and composer Gustav Mahler’s niece — and the women’s orchestra. Although she is not herself Jewish, Pickhardt “came to this story from the background of being a woman musician,” Radosh said. “She was pulled into it” by the testimony of the survivors and “cried every single day for three months” over the women, their ordeal, and how to make sense of it.

Pickhardt compiled excerpts from survivors’ memoirs that will be spoken, like a kind of Greek chorus, during the performance. One excerpt explains how the orchestra functioned: It notes that Rosé “understood [the orchestra’s] fragile status and was determined that our performance must be of the highest quality. Anything less would jeopardize the life of the orchestra and the lives of those of us in it. We practiced hours on end, eight to 10 hours a day. Our musical arrangements were created from memory and copied onto paper lined freehand by some of the weaker musicians among us. Our repertoire included a medley of Dvorak folk tunes, some Brahms Hungarian dances, Schubert’s ‘Lilac Time,’ snatches of ‘Tosca,’ Viennese waltzes — a real rag-bag of music.”

After its New York performance — which will be introduced by Dr. Ruth Westheimer, a refugee from the Holocaust and author of the recent “Musically Speaking: My Life Through Song” — Ars Choralis will take its production to Berlin and to Ravensbrück, where it will perform during liberation ceremonies in April.

Most of the 48 members of Ars Choralis “are passionate amateurs,” said Radosh, “with fabulous voices.” The 10 orchestra members are paid professionals. The project has been awarded grants by three foundations, including the Teaneck-based Puffin Foundation, but more is needed to fund the trip to Germany.

The New York concert, which begins at 8 p.m., is intended as a fund-raiser, she added. Tickets are $150 (dress circle), $45 (front reserved), $35 (front unreserved), and $25 (house), and can be bought at http://tinyurl.com/Tickets-for-Performance or by calling (866) 811-4111.