A TRIPTYCH

JERRY JACOBS, Chairman of the INTERFAITH COMMITTEE OF REMBRANCE, commissioned me to compose the music and libretto to IN MEMORIAM: A CELEBRATION for the fourth annual HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL CONCERT. The world premiered was on Saturday, November 13, 1993 before an audience of four thousand at Saint John the Divine in New York. The triumphant success of the premiere immediately went into the “pipeline,” and a second concert was scheduled for May 28, 1995, in Skokie, Illinois before an audience of fourteen hundred Holocaust Survivors. Jerry, a Survivor himself, was in attendance. In the very row behind him were twenty-two fellow Lodz ghetto Survivors. Needless to say, the evening was electric. I would subsequently link this work with SINFONIETTA # 1: THE KLEZMER and AN ELEGY INTO MADNESS. The combined pieces were specifically commissioned for the Fiftieth Anniversary of Israel, and titled A TRIPTYCH, which received its world première at Mandel Hall, the University of Chicago January 18, 1998.