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Woman's Hour: Opera arias reinvented, Holocaust survivor Rachel Levy

27/01/2022

Opera arias reinvented, Holocaust survivor Rachel Levy

BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour, Opera arias reinvented, Holocaust survivor Rachel Levy

The all female string quartet who are reimagining the songs of tragic operatic heroines.

We’re all too familiar with operatic heroines, dying tragically on stage. The arias they sing are often completely beautiful, the skill of the composers not in doubt, but the stereotyping does modern women no service. It’s a dilemma that award winning, all women string quartet Zaïde address in a new project entitled No(s) Dames.  They have teamed up with counter tenor Théophile Alexandre to showcase arias of tragic heroines by seventeen different composers. The twist is that it is male Theophile who sings the arias.  First violinist Charlotte Maclet joins Emma.

Today is National Holocaust Memorial Day and the Prince of Wales, as chairman of the National Holocaust Memorial Trust  has commissioned the portraits of seven Holocaust survivors all of them now in their nineties, whose childhoods were spent surviving the Nazis. The portraits will be displayed at the Queen's Gallery as a living memorial to the six million innocent men, women and children who lost their lives in the Holocaust and whose stories will never be told. A 60-minute BBC Two documentary Survivors: Portraits of the Holocaust will air tonight at 9 pm and has followed the creation of the artworks and the relationship between artists and sitters. Emma is joined by one of the survivors - Rachel Levy - who was painted by the artist Stuart Pearson Wright.

Image: Quatuor Zaïde quartet with Théophile Alexandre
Credit: Julien Benhamou

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