University Choir: Memorial concert - Dona nobis pacem

On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated the survivors of the largest German concentration and extermination camp: Auschwitz-Birkenau. At this time, there were still around 7,000 prisoners in the camp, including around 700 children.

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation, the HfMDK University Choir commemorates the victims of National Socialism and tyranny with compositions from the 20th century.

The main work of the concert is Alfred Schnittke's Requiem, which he composed exactly 50 years ago as "incidental music to Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos" for an unusual instrumental ensemble: the choir is accompanied by individual wind instruments, organ, piano, celesta and percussion as well as electric guitar and electric bass in a stylistically varied setting. The music of the fourteen, mostly short movements contains hardly any massive contrasts: alongside the mostly clear beauty of the chants, it sounds rather restrained, thoughtful, almost ghostly. Even the Sanctus in a minor key - and not the usual major key - does not make the breakthrough into a final radiant light.

The meditative, imploring "Dona nobis pacem" by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks from 1996 for choir with organ accompaniment and the expressive a cappella manifesto for democracy and freedom "Advance Democracy", which the young Benjamin Britten composed in 1938 as a reaction to the ultimately misguided appeasement policy towards National Socialism, are also performed.

"Dona nobis pacem" is also the title of the concert on January 27 and 28 at the HfMDK: Give us peace! January 27, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz, is not a public holiday. Rather, it prompts us to remember the past and reflect on the present and future. After all, remembering and actively confronting history is the best insurance against international hatred, totalitarianism, fascism and National Socialism.

Florian Lohmann has been a professor of choral conducting at the HfMDK Frankfurt since the 2019/20 winter semester. There, he is responsible for choral conducting training in the church music department as well as in the Bachelor's and Master's degree courses in Artistic Training in Music (KAM) and directs the chamber choir and the university choir.

He himself studied school music, German language and literature, singing and vocal pedagogy and was a scholarship holder of the Evangelische Studienstiftung Villigst. He has been artistic director of the Capella St. Crucis and the Collegium Vocale in Hanover for more than ten years. Invitations to festivals and competitions in Germany and abroad as well as CD and radio productions covering the entire stylistic spectrum from historical performance practice to contemporary vocal music, including several world premieres, document his work. In 2022, he was awarded the Hessian University Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

The University Choir of the HfMDK Frankfurt is made up of students from a wide range of degree courses in all faculties. The ensemble develops stylistically diverse concert programs - a cappella, accompanied by chamber music and with a large orchestra. Collaborations have already taken the choir to the Great Hall of the Alte Oper Frankfurt several times, where it has performed at the German Choral Festival, among other events. The choir also collaborates with the Department of Historical Interpretation Practice at the HfMDK, in the course of which it has already taken part in the Baroque Nights, for example. The university choir works closely with the HfMDK symphony orchestra on oratorio repertoire. Prof. Florian Lohmann has been conducting the ensemble since fall 2019.