…despite all their suffering, the music that was written and performed there expresses a strong will to live and attests to the power of the creative spirit… Such feelings are omnipresent in this beautifully recorded recital performed with wonderful sensitivity and immediacy by singers Anne Sofie von Otter and Christian Gerhaher and their highly responsive instrumental partners.

The music on this CD is beautiful, some of it comic, some of it elegiac, all of it almost unbearingly touching. All these composers were incarcerated in the concentration camp at Terezín in what is now the Czech Republic. One survivor, the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer has written: "Music allowed many inmates to bare their hearts...even in the darkest corners of the earth...it was, at least for the moment, a liberation." The songs by Ilse Weber and Karel Svenk are in the cabaret style, deceptively jolly tunes, overlaid with bitter irony in the words. Anne Sofie von Otter sings them with exquisite tenderness; Bengt Forsberg at the piano and Bebe Risenfors on guitar accompany lovingly. The three best-known composers whose works have survived from Terezín are Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann. Krása's Three Songs on texts by Rimbaud, Ullman's Six Sonnets and Haas's Four Songs on Chinese Poetry are all major works that change the perspective of the history of the German Lied. Christian Gerhaher sings the Krása and Ullmann with noble spirit.