Seventy years ago, on November 9, the Nazis' perpetrated their first organized violence against Jews throughout Germany, the pogrom called Kristallnacht, after the shattered glass of windows of vandalized and looted synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. To commemorate the heinous night signaling the start of the Holocaust, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, on Battery Place, and Canada's Artists of the Royal Conservatory of Music (ARC) collaborated on five days of concerts and other events, billed as "Music in Exile: Émigré Composers of the 1930s," in the museum's Edmond J. Safra Hall. The series ran from November 9 to 13 and its climax, entitled "Exiles to America," is considered here.

"Ballata dall'Esilio" (Ballad of the Exile), by Florentine-Jewish composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who fled Mussolini's Italy and settled in Beverly Hills, began the evening. A caressing farewell to a lady love, to a text by Dante contemporary Guido Cavalcanti, it proved as moving and spare as a Renaissance song, and was cleanly sung, with feeling, by baritone Chris Pedro Trakas, assisted by ARC Artistic Director Simon Wynberg on guitar. These artists proceeded to three concise songs from the "Hollywood Liederbuch," by Hanns Eisler, half-Jewish and a communist, whom Wynberg called a "double exile," who left Vienna when Hitler came to power and was deported to East Berlin in 1950, after investigation by the House-Un-American Activities Committee. "Hotelzimmer 1942" (Hotel Room 1942) and "An den kleinen Radioapparat" (To the little radio) expressed wistful reactions to hearing news of enemies' victories broadcast, while "Über den Selbstmord" (On suicide) was as bleak as its title suggests. Trakas and pianist James Anagnoson gave the world premiere of the five-song cycle "The Poet in Exile" (1991), by Walter Arlen, who survived internment in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps and lives in Los Angeles. A jagged lyricism marks these quiet reflections on memories of things past-places left behind, sights, sounds, and emotions-and Trakas lent them liquid tone. With a mention of "dance of the skeletons," a harsher recollection briefly intruded on the prevailing peacefulness.

The closing work was a short, grim and gripping theater piece, Marc Neikrug's "Through Roses," written during 1979 and 1980 and conducted by the composer, featuring actor and director Saul Rubinek, born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, as Carl Stern, a violinist and Auschwitz survivor, haunted by memories of making music in the concentration camp, while absorbing the horror around him. Stern's room, with scores and sheet music heaped everywhere, was situated downstage, and violinist Daniel Philips, cellist Timothy Eddy, percussionist Jonathan Haas, clarinetist Alan Kay, pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, flautist Tara Helen O'Connor, oboist Stephen Taylor, and violist Steven Tenenbom were arrayed upstage around it, playing the distorted melodies of an increasingly fraying Stern's hallucinations.

"Through Roses" began with relentless drumming and crystalline sounds that put the listener in mind of Kristallnacht itself. High strings and winds screamed out Stern's tormented memories. The protagonist woke up, made an effort to silence the musicians, and donned a tuxedo jacket over his pajamas, replicating the attire in which he played years before, after the camp commandant, ordering, "Come here, you pig with the violin," forced him to play while the bodies burned beyond "a hedge of roses, red roses, so lovely." Rubinek's Stern brought up and denied the idea of sex between guards and prisoners; to romantic strains, remembered a love long ago; mused on the "Ode to Joy," from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in a nightmarish form; cried out, from the recesses of his mind, "Keep the dogs away from me;" "And I played-it's my job," he said, for a sick, starving, dying audience, against the backdrop of the crematorium's "chimneys smoking," while stifling his emotions. The piece ended as it began, again suggesting the crystalline tinkling of broken glass.

An intense work, "Through Roses" is, undeniably, difficult and disturbing to experience, but its essential message must be heard. The Holocaust's horrors have to be remembered and recounted in order to ensure against anything akin to its devastation ever happening again.