Musical Culture In Nation's Capital Slowly Healing Itself ... National Gallery Of Art Music Program Remembers László Weiner (1916 – 1944)

Composer and conductor László Weiner (1916 – 1944) was deported by the Nazis to a forced labour camp in Slovakia and murdered there despite the efforts of composer Zoltán Kodály and Weiner's wife Vera Rózsa (who had assumed the false identity as a Christian).

Weiner's Duo for Violin and Viola was performed last night at the National Gallery of Art. Weiner’s four-movement Duo is dedicated to his good friends Viktor Ajtay (who later became the concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) and to Pál Lukács.

Last month, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Leon Botstein and with viola soloist Amos Boasson, premiered László Weiner's recently rediscovered Viola Concerto.

Following Vera Rózsa's medically truncated career as an opera singer due to her Holocaust hiding experience, she went on to teach, in London, Sarah Walker, Kiri Te Kanawa, Ileana Cotrubas, Agathe Martel, Karita Mattila (who will sing Richard Strauss's Drei Hymnen with the National Symphony Orchestra under Mikko Franck next week ***), Dorothea Röschmann, Tom Krause, Martina Bovet, Anne Sofie von Otter, Anne Howells, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Marie-Adele McArthur, Ildikó Komlósi and many others.

Header credit:

Jaromír Funke
Spiral (Spirala), 1924
Patrons' Permanent Fund
2005.118.2

Copyright © 2009 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

*** The promotion code for half-price $29.50 prime orchestra level seats is 42322.