Oratorio Terezin puts human faces on the holocaust, using a massive choir to convey the emotions of children who perished in a nazi concentration camp

When a 220-strong wall of choristers takes the stage at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier of Place des Arts Sunday afternoon to sing Ruth Fazal's Oratorio Terezin, roughly half the voices will belong to children and teenagers.

For some participants, the 100-plus youths in the massive vocal ensemble represent the children who survived Hitler's Terezin concentration camp near Prague.

Fifteen thousand children didn't.

Looking at her younger singing partners and thinking of those numbers puts a human face on the Holocaust for Shelby Cohen of the Vanier College Choir, which will provide 96 young-adult vocalists for Sunday's performance. For Cohen, that perspective defines the experience of singing Fazal's work. "It's almost like those 100 singers are the surviving children," she said. "Those are the voices."

For its text, Oratorio Terezin blends children's poetry that somehow survived the Nazi camp with passages from the Hebrew scriptures.

"With this piece, we're reading the actual poetry from the kids who are suffering. It's like we're actually talking to them and hearing what they have to say," said Patrick Ayoup, also of the Vanier choir. "We always hear about it at school in a historical context, but this really allows us to get deeper in."

Like the students, Erica Phare spoke of the oratorio's impact in terms of its humanity.

Phare is the director of both the Vanier choir and the McGill Conservatory Youth Choir, whose members will join forces for the event with Concerto Della Donna and Choeur des Enfants de Montréal, directed by Iwan Edwards. The 50-piece Amati Orchestra will provide accompaniment.

Phare said she attended the oratorio's world premiere in Toronto in 2003. It has since been performed in Europe, Israel and at Carnegie Hall. The real beginning for Phare, however, was when Fazal showed her the score - before Phare ever heard a note of the work.

"When Ruth shared the text and the context for this poetry, it seemed important to me to give voice to these children who died and never had the opportunity to speak for themselves," Phare said. Ultimately, Phare convinced her colleagues in the Vanier music department that the work should be performed here. Edwards was recruited and the project started snowballing, Phare said.

A precise calculation of rehearsal time invested by the four choirs and musicians in the oratorio's largest production so far is pretty much impossible. A ballpark figure of 150 hours - with the pre-show crunch still to come at the time of the Gazette interview - seemed reasonable to Phare.

But the singers weren't complaining about the endurance-testing practice time. "When I'm singing this music, I'm having almost an out-of-body experience," Cohen said. "I've listened to music before and really felt it, but to be a part of this is something else. You're having these experiences that are once in a lifetime."

Vanier choir member Sarah Pearson said she was challenged and, in the end, changed by the oratorio's visceral expressions of pain and suffering. "It's a very hard thing to actually open your heart to someone else's suffering," she said. "This work explores suffering in such a complex way that it's really hard not to get right into it and feel it."

And yet with its scriptural subtext, Fazal's piece attempts to come to terms with the question of God's presence in the midst of any faith-testing horror.

"The work starts off with I Remember," Phare said, referring to an opening passage from the Book of Jeremiah. "And it's God's voice. It's about saying 'I have not forgotten you.' And that message is for everybody. There's tenderness and compassion."

In the end, the oratorio's larger message is also about education and remembering the individual, Phare said.

"It's not just about the Holocaust," she said. "It's about Darfur. And it's about Rwanda. And it's about the Armenian genocide."

The three young choristers all agreed that they had been deeply affected by Fazal's piece. "It really brought a face to suffering in general," Ayoup said. "It opened my eyes to the world - everything in the Middle East, the genocides all over."

"I'm Jewish, and it's given me permission to grieve for the Holocaust," Pearson said. "And that is huge. I've never connected with the tragedy on anything more than an intellectual level. This piece has allowed me to say, 'I'm allowed to cry about this, to be devastated by this. And that's okay.' "

Oratorio Terezin will be performed Sunday at 3 p.m. at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $7.82 to $111.82. Call 514-790-1245 or go to www.admission.com. Also see www.oratorioterezin.com. For a video of choir rehearsals for the work, go to www.vanier

college.qc.ca/events/2008/oratorio-terezin/video.html.

bperusse@thegazette.canwest.com

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008

Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications