The extraordinary location and the extraordinary background (see background picture by Hiroyuki Masuyama) for a musical event also attracted our interest, a piano / cello concert by Margarita Mikhnievych (piano) and Peter Sarkar (cello) in the Rothamel Gallery in Erfurt.

If you usually meet lovers of classical music in the concert and music halls, the venue of the Rothamel Gallery was at least special, the selection of the pieces of music and that of the interpreting artists was of particular importance here:

Margarita Mikhnievych (piano) and Peter Sarkar (cello) present pieces by

1. P. Tchaikovsky, "Meditation" Op. 72 no. 5 (piano)
2. J. Stutschewsky, "Schir Yehudi" and a piece based on an old Jewish folk melody "Eli, Eli, lama asawthanu" (piano, cello)
3. S. Rachmaninoff, Prelude in G sharp minor, Op. 32 No. 12 (piano)
4. L. Janáček, "Fairy Tales" (piano, cello)
5. F. Chopin, Scherzo No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 31 (piano)
6. M. Skoryk, "Melody" (piano, cello)

Galerie Rothamel - a place for art with a past and a future

The Rothamel Gallery was founded in Erfurt in 1996 and is now a fixture in the German art world. She represents both established and up-and-coming positions. The focus of the program is on graduates from Central German art schools, but it also represents artists from the USA and Japan. The decisive selection criterion is artistic quality.

Professional gallery work includes art historical, journalistic and art market related aspects. We publish numerous catalogs with well-known publishers, cooperate regularly with German and European museums and exhibit at international art fairs. The aim is to establish our artists in the long term. Since 2005 we have had a branch in Frankfurt am Main, in the Fahrgasse, where numerous galleries have settled in the immediate vicinity of the MMK, the Schirn and the Kunstverein and a lively and radiant art venue has emerged.

The Erfurt parent company is in the Kleine Arche 1A, in the building of a former printing works, where the radical democratic "Weltbühne" was produced until 1933. It is a three-minute walk to the Kunsthalle, Angermuseum and Krönbacken are only a little further away.

Space and time are the focus of Hiroyuki Masuyama's art. He condenses them into sensual compositions that play with the viewer's perception.

His series "Flowers" shows flower meadows where all vegetation periods prevail at the same time. It evokes a fascinating panorama of the seasons, growth and life.

Peter Sarkar - musicologist and cellist

Peter Sarkar is the managing director and research associate at musica reanimata, a support association for the rediscovery of composers persecuted by the Nazis and their works. Which makes it clearer how the compilation of the pieces of music came about, all of them victims of the Nazi dictatorship.

The non-profit association "musica Reanimata", founded in 1990, aims to integrate the works of composers persecuted by the Nazis into public musical life. He organizes lecture concerts in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk and the Konzerthaus Berlin as well as scientific conferences. Research results are published in a separate book series and a journal. And as their manager and cellist, Peter Sarkar is a worthy representative:

They played and composed for their lives: the musicians and composers who were interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and other camps. "Music gives us the simple knowledge of the truth of life. The longings of the human heart seek a foothold in the sphere of tones. Thanks to its power and suggestive power, the music strengthened what is most important in the listeners - their true nature - and promoted man's self-respect, which was so cruelly trampled upon during the period of camp life," wrote Adam Kopycinski, conductor of the Auschwitz camp orchestra.

"Our will to culture was adequate to our will to live," explained the composer Viktor Ullmann, who came to the Nazi "model camp" Theresienstadt in 1942. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz and murdered along with other artists such as Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein and Hans Krasa - and, like the others, was forgotten.

Since 1990, the "musica reanimata" association has been making the composers who were interned in Theresienstadt and murdered in the death camps, as well as the composers who were persecuted by the Nazis, heard in the long term.

And with the pianist Margarita Mikhnievych, in the presentation of the pieces of music on the piano, the connection to the currently depressing war situation in Europe was also created, because she comes from the Ukraine as a war refugee.

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