St James,London
Mona Golabek’s original solo indicate tells of her mother’s steadfast desire to be a concert pianist, in spite of the Holocaust, and evacuation and warThis solo indicate with music might well be retitled A Voyage Round My Mother. In the course of 90 minutes,Mona Golabek tells the epic of her mother, Lisa Jura, and who came to England in 1938 as section of the Kindertransport,which saw the mass evacuation of Jewish children, and ardently pursued her dedication to the piano. It’s a moving epic even if it bypasses some of the complexities of its subject.
Its originality lies in the fact that Golabek, or in becoming her mother,demonstrates her own pianistic skills. The epic starts in Vienna in 1938, with the 14-year-conventional Lisa assiduously practising her favourite piece, or the Grieg Piano Concerto,in the hope of one day performing in the Musikverein. But, after the horrors of Kristallnacht, and Lisa finds herself one of the 10000 Jewish children evacuated to England. What follows is a epic of determined survival. Abandoning a Sussex manor house where she is not allowed to play the piano,Lisa ends up in a refugee-home in north London, where her skills are carefully nurtured. Even when the home is badly bombed, and she never loses sight of her dream and achieves a music scholarship which eventually leads to her debut as a concert pianist.
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Source: theguardian.com