Reichs Different Trains

Jeremy Eichler

In his acclaimed book Time's Echo – Music, Memory and the Second World War, historian and music critic Jeremy Eichler shows how composers transformed their war experiences into soaring monuments. Together with the author, we make the past audible and tangible in the Kleine Zaal. In a collaboration between Het Concertgebouw, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Concertvrienden, three string quartets are presented in memory of the victims of war and dictatorship.

Havrylets, Reich and Weinberg

From the Ukrainian composer Hanna Havrylets, who died two days after the Russian invasion in 2022, comes the moving Reminiscences. In Steve Reich’s Different Trains, the strings engage in a fascinating interplay with recorded testimonies from Holocaust survivors. The Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg fled from the Nazis to the Soviet Union in 1939, where he was confronted with even more antisemitism – and Stalin’s reign of terror. His stunning, highly accessible Sixth String Quartet from 1946 was banned before a single note had been played. It was not until 2007, eleven years after Weinberg’s death, that the work received its premiere.