Boston Symphony Hall Concert to Commemorate 80 Years Since Liberation of Nazi Camps and Voice Universal Longing for Freedom

Terezín Music Foundation concert event, titled “Liberation,” Sunday, November 9, 2025. Multiple ticket levels for the 3 pm reception, 4 pm concert, and dinner with the artists.

The program includes Yiddish resistance songs, music by renowned composers silenced by the Nazis, and a Beethoven Sonata once performed inside the Terezín camp.

Featured artists are pianist Beth Levin, soprano Lynda Bussgang, and saxophonist Philipp A. Stäudlin.

BOSTON, AUGUST 21, 2025 — A November 9 Boston Symphony Hall Terezín Music Foundation concert will honor 80 years since the liberation of more than 43,000 Nazi camps and musically voice the universal longing for freedom, with a program ranging from Yiddish resistance songs to Beethoven. Celebrated pianist Beth Levin will perform the Gideon Klein Piano Sonata (Terezín 1943), followed by Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31, which Klein performed in Terezín. Saxophonist Philipp A. Stäudlin and pianist Yoko Hagino will perform “Hot-Sonate Jazz” by Erwin Schulhoff, a composer persecuted by the Nazis. Newton, Massachusetts-based soprano Lynda Bussgang will perform Yiddish resistance and liberation songs. Tickets at tmfgala.org.

“It’s especially poignant to give voice to these silenced artists and their experience,” says TMF director and the concert’s producer Mark Ludwig, “not just because 80 years is a major landmark and our November 9 concert in fact falls on the anniversary if Kristallnacht, but also because their music calls out for freedom from tyranny, something so universally human and vital.”

Says pianist Beth Levin, “Gideon Klein’s piano sonata is a testament to his exceptional talent even in the face of what he knew to be his inevitable demise at Nazi hands. Similarly, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31, one of the master’s last pieces, is a work of paramount power and beauty. Klein performed it at least once in Terezín.”

“It is quite an honor to play Klein and Beethoven together,” Levin says. “And it evokes memories of my own beloved teacher, Marian Filar, who was interned in the camps and freed by the Liberators. Many of us find our own liberation through music.”

Ludwig points to the lyrics to a Yiddish song on the program, “Zog nit keyn mal (Never),” as “expressing a universal longing for freedom . . . ”

From green lands of palm to lands with white snow
We come with our pain and our woes
And from where a spurt of our blood falls
Will sprout our strength and our courage

The November 9 concert is dedicated to the late Dr. Anna Ornstein, renowned psychiatrist, survivor of Auschwitz, and long-time Terezín Music Foundation board member and educator, who passed away in Brookline, Massachusetts, on July 2, 2025.

At a benefactors’ dinner following the concert, the Foundation’s annual Terezín Legacy Award will be presented to Dr. Kevin Tabb and Caron Tabb of Newton, Massachusetts, recognizing their contributions to Holocaust remembrance, Jewish cultural preservation, and social justice. Dr. Tabb is President and Chief Executive Officer of Beth Israel Lahey Health, and Caron Tabb is a mixed-media artist. Previous Award recipients include Senator Ed Markey and Rear Admiral Susan J. Blumenthal, MD, MPA; former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, Secretary Madeleine Albright, and Norman L. Eisen.

Mark Ludwig, the concert’s producer and director, is an internationally recognized scholar of music under the Third Reich, violist emeritus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, founder and director of Terezín Music Foundation, and an activist supporting artists struggling against genocide, oppression, and war. He is the author of “Our Will to Live: The Terezín Music Critiques of Viktor Ullmann” (Steidl 2022), which the Philadelphia Inquirer called “exhilarating” and “monumental.”

Terezín Music Foundation is a Boston-based nonprofit founded in 1991 to amplify the legacy of the artists imprisoned in Terezín with concerts, commissions, publications, and Holocaust and genocide education programs around the world. TMF commission composers include André Previn, Sivan Eldar, Pablo Ortiz, and others, including Nico Muhly, who said, “TMF commissions are a radical answer to the silence.”