TULIPS & CHIMNEYS
The Life and Death Orchestra
This Way For the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen
When trying to find interesting things to write about for a journal entry, I stumbled across something called The Life and Death Orchestra. There was not much information to be found about the group, but I did gather that it is a musical group that focuses it's artistic energy on the events of the Holocaust.
The composers and main performers of The Life and Death Orchestra are Bill Smith, Bim Sinclair, Angi Mariani and Herbie Flowers. Their album, Songs for the Betrayed World is a compilation of Holocaust survivor's poems set to music. It took 25 years to put together. In a BBC interview in 2004, Bill Smith, the creator of the album, says that it came about because he read a book called "The Poetry of Survival" and it was really moving to him. He set a few of the poems to music and decided to expand the project and met with a Jewish composer to complete the project.
He wanted to use poems that provided eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. A passage from Elie Wiesel's Night is also recorded on the album. I found this to be a really interesting way to commemorate the Holocaust. It is different because it is not something you can read, or watch, or look at. It is something that you hear. The Life and Death Orchestra focuses on the need to let the voices and feelings of guilt, and anger be heard and speak the unspeakable. Their songs form pictures and leave lasting messages. The songs are all really intense and moving.
This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen is one of the most moving songs on the album. It was adapted from the short story by Tadeusz Borowski and it depicts an ordinary but horrific day in the gas chambers detailing things like the zyklon B, the cruelty of the SS, the transports, the summary executions, and the slaughter that went on there. The song has also been adapted into a short musical production.
The Life and Death Orchestra
This Way For the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen
A fun musical about the horrors of Auschwitz sounds like an oxymoron. But the writers and producers of the Life and Death Orchestra have created a powerful new work, which premiered at Komedia on Holocaust Memorial Day. With a first half based on daily life in Auschwitz and the second about the present-day tragedy of Darfur, the musical trod a fine line between the horrors of genocide and the optimism of the human spirit.
The story mainly revolved around Holocaust survivor Tadeusz Borowsky (Beth Morgan). The show's epic song, This Way For The Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, was adapted from his tale of an ordinary day in Auschwitz.
Other characters included Polish deputy Kapo (Ross Gurney-Randall), who was forced to work in the gas chambers, Borowsky's girlfriend Maria Rundo (Adele Ziz), Micheline Maurel (Angi Mariani), and the artist Arnold Daghani (Guy Picot) and his wife Nanino (Jenny James), the sole survivors of Mikhailowka forced labour camp. These last two later emigrated to the UK, becoming residents of Hove.
The show also featured Joan (Kerry Mclean) playing a Darfur refugee. Composer Bill Smith believes Borowsky's account to be one of the great works of world literature. "Even though prisoners were not complicit in these barbaric acts, Tadeusz Borowsky felt immense guilt," he said.
Although the characters were based on real people the words they spoke were drawn from many sources, including their own texts. Written by Smith, Guy Picot and Angi Mariani with music by Smith and Bim Sinclair, the score was performed by the Brighton Youth Orchestra conducted by Andrew Sherwood, and the Rainbow Chorus. Far from a superficial sing-along musical, this was a performance that treated its audience like intelligent people concerned with real issues.
The Argus, Ferbruary 2007
EDINBURGH FESTIVAL
REVIEWS:
SCOTSMAN.COM
5 stars
Well done,
somebody; candles and red tablecloths bring a welcome degree of
nightclub intimacy to the cavernous barn that is the Southside
Theatre.
Bill Smith,
the composer of all the songs we are going to hear today, greets
us as we sit down and tells us that the words are written by people
who survived the Nazi concentration camps, or visited them afterwards.
The orchestra of seven take their places. The music begins.
"After Auschwitz,
poetry is barbaric," wrote the German critic Theodor Adorno. But
the Life and Death Orchestra adhere to the greater imperative;
the need to give voice to feelings of guilt, anger, despair and
human betrayal, to speak of the unspeakable.
As they play and sing, pictures begin to form of a terrible, monochrome
place; a place where real and desperate people throw their last
messages from trains and gas is carried to the chambers in Red
Cross vans; a place where children are flung in the air for target
practice and parents must scour the ground for little naked bodies.
And so what
was billed as "an astonishingly dramatic musical performance"
was, in many ways, the opposite; a simple, delicate, respectful
and utterly moving collection of songs, narratives and instrumental
pieces, eschewing the blatancy of drama in favour of the power
of words and music and the sheer weight of history.
The songs
are rich and intense - from strong narrative works like "Five
Men" or "Death Fugue", musically reminiscent of Bob Dylan's best
work, to melancholy gypsy paeans and exceptional, emotional pieces
like "This Way to the Gas". At times the violin becomes a train,
then the screams of its human cargo; Herbie Flowers's bass talks
of foreboding and doom; Angi Mariani's voice soars sweetly and
the sense of engagement is total. I would have liked a little
more from Bill Smith in the way of introductions to some of the
pieces and the stage lighting was a bit on the harsh and static
side. Other than that, it lives long in the memory, one of the
most moving and enriching shows on the Fringe.
Penny Barr Wednesday, 8th August 2001 scotsman.com
EDINBURGH
GUIDE.COM
5 stars
The Life
& Death Orchestra This Way For The Gas Ladies & Gentlemen
"Unmissable"
Venue Komedia Southside
This is a
unique show - a collection of poems on the holocaust set to music.
It is simple but moving. Some of the songs are hauntingly beautiful
and will linger in the mind long after the performance is over.
The lyrics - which include work by two nobel laureates - are very
powerful. It's the mix that hits you.
There are terrible images of course, and horrific gallows humour,
as in Children ("You'd think it would be harder to kill the children.
It's easy. They can be thrown in the air for target practice...").
However these are intertwined with poems of life, dignity - even
love. And it has the terrible force of being true. A couple of
pieces are responses to the holocaust, but most are auto-biographical.
One is a last message from a child, thrown from a train: "Don't
cry for me Mummy, I am strong."
Also included is a simple meditation on more recent genocides
by British poet Kevin Carey: "Remember Dachau which you said would
never happen again." The quality of playing is excellent. The
music, which has an appropriately eastern european feel to it,
sets of the poems well. Soft sad waltzs predominate, although
a couple of pieces are pared down to rhythm and a tortured violin.
There are flaws to this show but the strength of the poetry shines
through. It must be the most tragic moving show in the festival.
The Life
and Death Orchestra
The musical
programme of this piece, based on writings from and about the
Holocaust, is a deeply moving experience. It is very much to the
credit of the creators and performers that it is also ultimately
more uplifting that depressing.
The seven
piece orchestra is led by Bill Smith, who set the poetry, letters
and memoirs that make up the text to music. He alternates vocal
duties with Angi Mariani, and while neither has a conventionally
trained voice - he leans toward Dylanesque nasality while she
has a church singer's tremolo - the roughness of their delivery
gives it all a passionate sincerity.
Texts range
from survivor memoirs to the works of poets like Zbigniew
Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz. The juxtapositions of prose and music
can prove very affecting, as when the mode of a torch song supports
lyrics about the ultimate separation. Most movingly, the programme
ends with a waltz and the affirmation of love and life.a fully
worthwhile hour.
Gerald
Berkowitz, The Stage
Theatre Review
The Life and Death Orchestra
Gallows humour
is fused with words of unfathomable poignancy by Brighton's Life
and Death Orchestra in their musical about the Holocaust and genocide,
"This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen". Based
on the writings of Holocaust survivors and poets, the production
by the seven-piece orchestra harmonises the harrowing recollections
of the Nazi concentration camps in a series of 18 songs, interspersed
with stark narrative passages.
Incorporating
the outer limits of what humanity has proved capable of doing
to itself in a song may seem incongruous, but Bill Smith and Bim
Sinclair's compositions prove a compelling amalgam of Tom Waits'
black vision with String Driven Thing's tortured humanity - and
are searing in their simplicity.
From the
wispily haunting despair of 'Never', to the jauntily ironic despair
of the Ravensbruck inspired 'Be Happy', via the casually destructive
velocity of a bullet in 'Five Men', the message may be unerringly
bleak, but there is also a delicate beauty in pianist Mike Hatchard's
instrumental, 'Klara's Escape', and for all their horror the lyrics
also look out across history to find universal, albeit unedifying
truths.
Angi Mariani
is superb in the title piece, based on the words of Tadeusz Borowski,
- who survived Auschwitz only to commit suicide in Warsaw.
Lee Levitt,
August 2001
Journalist, Jewish Chronicle
The Life
and Death Orchestra
This Way For the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen
Go placidly
amid the noise and haste of the Fringe and remember what peace
there is in silence. We sat in silence, stunned by the sheer emotional
waste of humanity portrayed in the almost informal performance
of songs and narrative taken from the victims of the Nazi Death
camps. Bill Smith introduced each section with heartfelt conviction
and the accomplished musicianship of the orchestra was evident
immediately. The acoustics of the venue were well mixed and suited
the sombre nature of the pieces incredibly well.
Nick Pynn;s
violin, shrieking a discordant wail in the opening cacophony of
Deathfugue and then soaring into wonderful rapture with Angi Mariani's
ethereal vocals, singing of 'naked little bodies with bloated
skin' was enough to make you weep.
It is a masterpiece.Humanity
is listening and long may the voices from the Holocaust of man's
making be heard.
Marc de
Launay, Metro, August 16 2001
Despairing
Lyrics with Upbeat Message
Songs for the Betrayed World by The Life and Death Orchestra
The Life
and Death Orchestra, the stirring Brighton based group, played
away from home for the first time to launch Manchester's Holocaust
Education Week.
In fact,
it was a Jewish Telegraph article last September which led to
the booking for this auspicious occasion.
Their rousing
music, which combines the often despairing lyrics of holocaust
testimonies with upbeat music, itself a symbol of hope, was a
supremely fitting performance for the occasion.
Now the orchestra
would like to tour nationally.
Composer
and vocalist Bill Smith was given a book of Holocaust poems a
few years ago. He was so moved that he set them to music. He says,
"The poems led me to want to know more about the Holocaust,
so I researched, read and spoke to people about the Holocaust
as much as I could.
On of the
outstanding writers whose work is used, is Tadeusz Borowski, who
survived Auschwitz, but gassed himself in 1951 because he could
not cope with the guilt of survival. This Way for the Gas, Ladies
and Gentlemen, is a cynical portrayal of Jewish Kapos who collaborated
in concentration camps in order to save their own skins.
Prose pieces
are also set to music. One of the most poignant is by Ruth
Altbeker Cyprys, describing a letter from a 10 year old girl on
her way to
the death camps to her mother.
The CD and
concert also contain pieces on more recent massacres, as well
as from Elie Wiesel and Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai. Despite
the gruesome nature of much of the lyrics, the inspiringly haunting
music with excellent vocals by Bill Smith and Angi Mariani form
an unforgettable experience.
Songs for
the Betrayed World is available from The Life and Death Orchestra
at info@lifeanddeath.org,
or from all good record shops in the UK.
DW, The
Jewish Telegraph, 2001
PREVIOUS
CONCERTS
Edinburgh
Festival August 4th - 17th 2001.
KOMEDIA, Brighton Brighton May Festival concerts - May 2000
Manchester
Town Hall, Albert Square, Manchester
Sunday, 21st January 2001
Pavilion
Theatre, Brighton
Saturday, 27th January 2001
