HOLOCAUST REMEMBERED IN BERLIN

Tonight at the Gindi Auditorium in Bel-Air, members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic will participate in “A Holocaust Memorial Concert” in observance of Yom Hashoah, a day set aside to recall that horrible chapter in Jewish history.

Later this week, the Philharmonic flies to West Berlin to participate in the Berlin Festival marking the 750th birthday of that German city.

The two events have much in common.

West Berlin will revel in its past glories, while it attempts to come to grips with its past ignominies, according to Elmar Weingarten, director of musical events for the Berlin Festival. “The city is taking the chance to look back on the last 50 years, as well as the 700 years before that,” he said. The significance of that statement was obvious: The Holocaust will not be swept under the rug as West Berlin celebrates. (East Berlin isn’t joining in these festivities.)

Weingarten was in Los Angeles in December to finalize arrangements for the Philharmonic’s participation at the festival, which opens Thursday. While here, he discussed the numerous festival concerts that focus on “Music From Exile.”

“We will be bringing back the works of composers who have been in exile--Toch, Schoenberg, Weill, Eisler, Goldschmidt and others,” Weingarten said. “Some of those who are still alive will come for these concerts. It is a way for us to grasp our roots, so to speak.

“On the 40th anniversary of the end of Nazism, our President (Richard von Weizsacker) gave a speech pointing out our continual desire to remove the memories (of the Holocaust). He told us that now we should ask, ‘What can we do to bring them back?’ ”

In that spirit, the Philharmonic has included works by composers who left Germany to eventually settle in Southern California: “Principals,” by music director Andre Previn, who was born in Berlin but escaped with his family while a boy; the Violin Concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the Five Pieces of Schoenberg, both of whom left as adults.

After the festival, Previn and the Philharmonic will tour Europe for the first time together. In West Berlin, the orchestra will alternate at opening-week concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic, led by Herbert von Karajan--a reminder of the Sister City relationship between L.A. and West Berlin.

The rest of the world, as well, will be turning its attention to the German city this year, Weingarten said.

“We have invited the La Scala, Vienna and Munich opera companies. I hope that companies from Kiev and Moscow find their way.”

Active participation from another nation is worth noting: Israel will send the Habimah Theatre and Israel Philharmonic to West Berlin.

Hans Werner Henze is one of a group of contemporary German composers who have chosen to express in music their horror at the Holocaust, Neal Brostoff said.

Brostoff, artistic director of the locally based Jewish Music Foundation, spoke recently about a collaborative work by Henze and four other composers titled “Juedische Chronik” (“Jewish Chronicles”), which will receive its West Coast premiere tonight at Gindi Auditorium. “Henze has said that art needs to take a stand, to ‘remain alert,’ quoting one of the lines in the final movement. The piece was inspired by renewed acts, in 1963, of anti-Semitism in Germany. I think it’s interesting that both East and West German composers produced the work.” Each composer--Henze, Paul Dessau, Boris Blacher, Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Rudolph Wagner-Regeny--contributed one movement, using a text by Jens Gerlach.

Interestingly, only Dessau is Jewish. “I am intentionally trying to offer music by figures who are not identified as Jewish composers,” Brostoff said. “The soul of a Jewish composer is not necessary to write Jewish music.”

Brostoff, who will serve as pianist in the premiere of Stephen Jaffe’s Three Yiddish Songs and in Srul Irving Glick’s “. . . i never saw another butterfly . . .,” noted that listeners may find the program to be challenging musically, as well as emotionally. “Here is intelligent music, which is not really that accessible.

“What I’ve tried to do is gather these pieces in one basket and to reach out beyond the Jewish community. There is painfully little music about the Holocaust.”

This concert is the second of three musical events dealing with the subject--the first was in 1983 at the Schoenberg Institute. The final program in June will be, for Brostoff, “my final statement on this.”

As important as it is, the subject of the Holocaust remains a grim one for his listeners, he said. “I realize that this music is challenging to an audience.

“But the concert won’t be all dark and depressing. There is a flash of whimsy in one of the poems from ‘butterfly.’ Unfortunately, I’m afraid there are not that many light sides to the subject.”