Sugihara Concert at Carnegie Hall

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem and the American Society for Yad Vashem announced the American premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6, “Vessels of Light,” which will take place on April 19th, 2023, at Carnegie Hall. Auerbach’s monumental work includes words of several great Yiddish poets: Yisroel Emyot, Dovid Hofshteyn, Itzik Manger, Peretz Markish, Avrom Sutzkever, Moyshe Teyf, Reyzl Zhikhlinski, and others.

The evening’s master of ceremonies will be Zalman Mlotek, who is also the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York. Yevgeny Kissin, a famed piano virtuoso and a contemporary Yiddish poet, helped to choose the poems and translated some of the Yiddish text into English for the symphony.

Lera Auerbach is a Soviet-born Jewish Austrian and American classical composer, conductor and concert pianist who wrote in her official statement: “I chose Yiddish poetry for the libretto – as a tribute to the Yiddish language”. According to Auerbach, the title of the work, Vessels of Light, stems from the mystical Kabbalistic concept of “broken vessels”.

The world-renowned Japanese-American-Israeli cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper who inspired Auerbach to write the work, will be performing at Carnegie Hall as a soloist, together with the New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Constantine Orbelian.

Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat to Lithuania who saved up to 6,000 Jewish refugees during WWII. It has been estimated that as many as 100,000 people alive today are descendants of those who were saved from the Holocaust thanks to Sugihara’s visas.