★★★☆☆
The Barbican’s website advised that punters were in for events that “deal with subjects of a distressing nature”. Well, this was a string of concerts and ancillaries devoted to music from the Nazi camps and ghettos of the Second World War. Jollity of a brittle kind certainly appeared in the opening salvo of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s lunchtime concert, Hans Krasa’s Overture for Small Orchestra, written and premiered at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) camp north of Prague. But it only took a bout of piano fury for the piece’s cracks to open wide.
If distressing subjects abounded in the BBC’s annual “Total Immersion” day — I caught two thirds of it — so did astonishment and relief that these captive artists’ creativity could bring