Radio Chamber Orchestra - live broadcast
Wednesday, 9 June 2010 , 19.00

The first Romanian audition at Radio Romania Music on Wednesday, June 9th: an outstanding work, written by a composer and a librettist who died in the concentration camp in Terezín in 1944.

Before being imprisoned, Viktor Ullman, born in 1898, had been an excellent pianist, had participated in Arnold Schönberg students’ group, had been guided by conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky, had cooperated with the Czech Radio and had written music chronicles in different publications. Poet and playwright Peter Kien was born in 1919; being in the same camp with Viktor Ullman, he wrote the libretto for Ullman’s opera, composed in 1943.

The work, in fact a legend in four scenes, benefited from a rehearsal in Terezín, but was never played there and, moreover, it was forbidden. It is named The Emperor of Atlantis or The Refusal of Death and, as the publisher and the contemporary American music critic John Rockwell says, it narrates how death itself abdicates in front of the horrors of existence.

This emperor who was reigning over a great part of the world declares war against everything and everybody and proclaims that his old ally, Death, will lead the campaign. Offended by the Emperor’s presumption, Death breaks his sword in two and announces: from now on, people will no longer die. Confusion spreads on the entire Earth: two soldiers, a man and a woman, fighting in rival camps, end by singing a love duet, the sick and the suffering can no longer find their peace. Death says it will come back on one condition – that the Emperor be the first to breathe his last. The Emperor accepts and takes his final farewell.

The première of the work The Emperor of Atlantis is brought to Romania by conductor Amaury du Closel. On the same Wednesday evening, June 9th, the Radio Chamber Orchestra will present the Dance Suite by Ernst Toch, a modern Austrian composer – you can listen to them either in the ‘Mihail Jora’ Studio or in a live broadcast on Radio Romania Music, starting at 19.00.