Poems from the Holocaust

Allan Blank (1925-2013) began his professional career as a violinist in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, but spent the larger part of his career teaching composition and completing over 200 works, including stage, orchestral and chamber music. Blank studied at the Julliard School, University of Minnesota, and held several positions before his appointment at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he worked until 1996.
Blank, Jewish himself, was married to Margot Dreyfus Blank, a survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp in today’s Czech Republic. Poems from the Holocaust is a set of songs for voice (mezzo-soprano or alto), double bass and piano, composed in 1996. In addition to using texts in Yiddish, Blank drew upon English translations of poems written by and about child victims of the camp. The work is framed by movements for bass, which embodies the significance of the spiritual De Profundis: “Out of the depths, I cry to you, Lord…” Blank also used poems collected as part of an exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, powerful texts that speak with a directness about the hopes and fears of children caught up in the horrors of world war and genocide.

(c) Jason Stell and Angela Young Smucker