Youth pro Musica Spring Concert: Saturday, June 9 in Newton

Robert Barney conducts Youth pro Musica, The Greater Boston Youth Chorus, in its Spring Concert featuring Charles Davidson’s I Never Saw Another Butterfly, on Saturday, June 9 at 7 PM at Eliot Church, 474 Centre Street in Newton. The program also includes selections by Bach and Handel from YpM’s recent Waiting for Cousin Sebastian program as part of the Boston Bach Birthday Bash. Youth pro Musica's three choruses will sing in this concert.

Tickets are $20, $15 for seniors and students over 15, available at the door. Children 15 and under FREE. To reserve tickets at a discounted price, please visit http://youthpromusica.org/tickets/.

The Newton-based youth chorus welcomes singers grades 3 through 12 in its three choruses: Training Chorus, Repertory Chorus and High School Ensemble. Youth pro Music has presented four outstanding programs this year involving young singers from Newton and the surrounding communities. The chorus has toured to New York City and Montreal to perform.

Charles Davidson’s choral song cycle, I Never Saw Another Butterfly (1968), is one of many Holocaust-inspired musical works related to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) experience. Its texts are from a collection of poems written by Jewish children imprisoned in that transit-concentration camp as they awaited removal to death camps. In these poems, Davidson saw the artistic potential of a serious choral work that does not trivialize the Holocaust or the barbarity symbolized by Terezin. These poems are a dramatic reminder to the world—by virtue of the childlike innocence and naïve hope expressed in the resolute courage of those young poets—of the depth of the unredeemable, savage brutality of the Nazi death machine that sought nothing less than the annihilation of the Jewish people and its children.

The cycle begins with a Preludium: Night in the Ghetto and continues with 12 poems by Terezin's children. The poetry and its musical expression are filled with poignant sentiments and touching references to deprivation and longing—all tempered by youthful resilience—and the music echoes in its most lyrical moments the universally typical spirits of children.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly was commissioned by the East End Synagogue (Long Beach, NY) and was dedicated to the American Boychoir (Princeton, NJ), which has performed the work at concerts throughout North America and Europe. This work has been part of Youth pro Musica's repertoire for over 20 years.