“Kirchenkonzert” means “Church concert.” My community band (Stadtmusik Kandern) played a concert in the Evangelical church in town on Sunday, May 22. A few months ago, the director of the band could see that I was getting bored playing tuba. As he is my next-door neighbor, he had heard me playing violin, so he approached me about playing a solo with the band. Eagerly, I agreed to learn the theme from “Schindler’s List” to play at the church concert. I was rather unsure about how the balance would be when pitting violin against powerful brass and shrill woodwinds, but in the church the acoustics turned out to be quite good.
At the end of the concert, the band president gave flowers to the two soloists, myself and a pianist Gergana Schneider.
A couple days later, someone at school walked up to me with a big copy of a newspaper and said, “You made the newspaper!” The Badische Zeitung is a regional newspaper covering the southern part of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. If you can read German (or to look at the picture of the whole band), check out the article here. A few key phrases and their translations:
Zu den Höhepunkten des Abends gehörten die Soloauftritte der Pianistin Gergana Schneider und der Violinistin Jill Musick.
The high points of the evening belonged to the solo performances of the pianist Gergana Scheider and of the violinist Jill Musick.
Der Auftritt der Violinistin Jill Musick war einer der Höhepunkte des Konzertes. Sie spielte Musik aus “Schindlers Liste”, dem bekannten Film über einen Fabrikanten, der in der Hitlerzeit mehr als 1000 jüdische Arbeiter vor Auschwitz rettete. Mit kraftvoll warmem Strich vermittelte die Miskerin, die an der Black Forest Academy unterrichtet, Trauer, aber auch Hoffnung.
The performance of the violinist Jill Musick was one of the high points of the evening. She played music from “Schindler’s List,” the famous film about a factory owner who saved more than 1000 Jewish workers from Auschwitz. With strong, warm bow strokes the musician, who teaches at Black Forest Academy, communicated sadness but also hope.
The music naturally lends itself to emotion-filled playing. Many of the audience members and other players in the band expressed that the violin was the ideal instrument to express such sadness and pain. It was an honor to be chosen to play the beautiful piece of music in a church in Germany, a land with a conflicted and shameful past.
