Pavel Haas

Almost 50 years ago in the Nazi "model" concentration camp Terezin in Czechoslovakia, artists and composers were permitted to paint, draw, write and lecture. One of the works created there, Pavel Haas' "Study for String Orchestra," survived, even though its composer did not. Although Haas probably knew he and almost everyone else at the camp were doomed, he wrote a piece that is celebrated today for being full of life.

For Dasha Lewin, the memories came flooding back Wednesday night as she listened in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform a work composed at the Nazi concentration camp Terezin--where she was imprisoned as a child. Like Lewin, the work, Pavel Haas' Study for String Orchestra, survived, although the composer did not. "I am hearing it as if I am there," said Lewin, who said her father died in Terezin, in Czechoslovakia.

For Dasha Lewin, the memories came flooding back Wednesday night as she listened in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform a work composed at the Nazi concentration camp Terezin--where she was imprisoned as a child. Like Lewin, the work, Pavel Haas' Study for String Orchestra, survived, although the composer did not. "I am hearing it as if I am there," said Lewin, who said her father died in Terezin, in Czechoslovakia.

It has been 10 long years since Seiji Ozawa and the mighty Boston Symphony Orchestra last visited the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Then, armed with a bold and difficult program (Maxwell Davies' then-new Symphony No. 2 and Stravinsky's "Sacre"), the BSO played like a world-class virtuoso orchestra of our dreams. Wednesday night, a decade later--same hall, same conductor--the BSO sounded strangely mortal, distressingly so, in the second of its two programs here.

It has been 10 long years since Seiji Ozawa and the mighty Boston Symphony Orchestra last visited the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Then, armed with a bold and difficult program (Maxwell Davies' then-new Symphony No. 2 and Stravinsky's "Sacre"), the BSO played like a world-class virtuoso orchestra of our dreams. Wednesday night, a decade later--same hall, same conductor--the BSO sounded strangely mortal, distressingly so, in the second of its two programs here.

Frances Steiner seems to consistently put together intelligent, unhackneyed programs for her Chamber Orchestra of the South Bay. Saturday night was no exception: in pointed contrast to untroubled teen-age works by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Rossini stood the Study for Strings by Pavel Haas, written in the Terezin concentration camp shortly before the composer was sent to the gas chamber. Giving their first entirely classical concert in the new James R.

A program at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC, Tuesday night, was first and foremost a tribute to the human spirit under the most difficult conditions imaginable. It was a survey of music by four composers who were trapped in the concentration camp in Theresienstadt (Terezin), Czechoslovakia, awaiting transit to the Nazi death camps.

There was a lot of history hovering over the Royce Hall stage Monday evening, and much hope as well. An international consortium of musical forces and the confluence of the 950th anniversary of the city of Nuremberg, the 62nd anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht terror and the 10th anniversary of the death of Leonard Bernstein have produced "Sounds of Healing," commemorative performances of Bernstein's "Kaddish" Symphony here and in Nuremberg later this month.

The first time composer Nick Strimple heard the music from the city called Paradise Ghetto by the Nazis, he couldn't shake the feeling it gave him. Although he is neither Czech or Jewish, the composer and conductor found the music from Terezin gripping and "emotionally very intense," he said. On Thursday, Strimple will direct members of the Choral Society of Southern California in a concert of choral and chamber music from the Czech city.

The Ojai Music Festival this year is concerned with "last and latest thoughts." For the main concerts tonight, Saturday night and early Sunday evening, the Emerson String Quartet will play late Beethoven and Shostakovich. A symposium, begun Thursday and continuing today, examines the nature of late work in general and that of Beethoven, Shostakovich and Strauss in particular.

Almost 50 years ago in the Nazi "model" concentration camp Terezin in Czechoslovakia, artists and composers were permitted to paint, draw, write and lecture. One of the works created there, Pavel Haas' "Study for String Orchestra," survived, even though its composer did not. Although Haas probably knew he and almost everyone else at the camp were doomed, he wrote a piece that is celebrated today for being full of life.

When Auschwitz-bound composer Viktor Ullmann handed over his scores to fellow Terezin prisoner Emil Utitz in October 1944, he had to be hoping against hope that the manuscripts might somehow be salvaged amid the Nazi carnage all around him. But Ullmann could scarcely have imagined that, more than 50 years later, one of his most wrenching works would be staged by an Austrian ensemble on the bleak grounds of the Terezin camp itself--before an audience of Holocaust survivors.