COURAGE AND HOPE PREVAIL: ESTHER OFFERS A TIMELESS RESPONSE TO HISTORY
The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and conductor Kirill Karabits, joined by an outstanding cast led by Corinne Winters and Yuriy Yurchuk, present the world premiere recording of Thomas de Hartmann’s lost opera Esther. Often written by candlelight during the Nazi occupation of Paris, Esther was composed as de Hartmann—a non-Jewish Ukrainian expatriate—lived through the unfolding horrors of the Holocaust. He perceived profound parallels between those events and the Biblical story of Esther as dramatized in Jean Racine’s play, from whose text he adapted the libretto. Esther is perhaps the only major musical work composed contemporaneously as a direct artistic response to the Holocaust.