Guitar Recital by Massimo Scattolin and Readings by Ass. Prof Avril Alba from the book Internee Number 6
With the bill n. 211 of the 2000, the Italian government established the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022. Since then and every year, in Italy and abroad, all the actors of the Sistema Paese commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and of the Nazism. The day on which Soviet troops broke down the gates of the Auschwitz extermination camp, January 27, was chosen by the UN with a resolution dated 2005.
Also for 2024 the Italian Cultural Institute will commemorate the anniversary by organizing a classical guitar recital by the internationally renowned guitarist Massimo Scattolin, who, for the occasion, Scattolin will present a special program with the significant title 10 November 1938, a collection of songs he composed and in the past presented as soundtracks for fiction and theatrical dramas.
The concert will be accompanied by a dramatic reading of excerpts from Maria Eisenstein’s diary Internee Number 6, (1944), one of the earliest testimonies of life in a fascist concentration camp. The English text is translated from the Italian original: L’internata numero 6 (Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2014) and was first presented to the public by the Primo Levi Center in New York in 2020. The reading will be performed by Avril Alba, Associate Professor in Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney.
Internee Number 6 is the first memoir written in a fascist internment camp in Italy. While recounting an intimate experience of uprooting, war, and imprisonment, Maria Eisenstein ‘s diary paints a subtle fresco of the cultural and psychological atmosphere in which well-meaning men and women performed the ideals of morality, strength, and valour that gave Fascism its foundation. The volume was published in Rome in 1944, two months after the Allied Army entered the city. The small run of the first edition was for the most part lost and the book was almost immediately forgotten along with its author, a Viennese literary scholar who graduated from the University of in Florence in the 1930s with a dissertation on Goethe.
The Institute acknowledges with gratitude both the Primo Levi Center and Eric Feingersh Steele, Maria’s son, for generously allowing the original text and its English translation to be used for this event. A printed version of the translation by Will Schutt, Internee Number 6, by Maria Eisenstein, with a preface by Eric Feingersh Steele and a historical essay by Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, is forthcoming by CPL Editions.
After studying with Andres Segovia, Massimo Scattolin began his concert career as a soloist, later developing chamber and orchestral activity. Scattolin has been defined by critics as one of the best guitarists of our times and is well known by European, Asian, North and South American and Australian audiences. He has worked with the main European television networks, as well as with great theater actors such as Cucciolla, Pagliai and Gassman. He regularly participates in international festivals and is the first Italian guitarist to have held masterclasses at the “Mozarteum” in Salzburg. He has more than 50 recordings to his credit, with orchestra, as a soloist and in collaboration with musicians such as the violinists Giuliano Carmignola, Domenico Nordio, Paolo Tagliamento and Franco Mezzena, the cellists Patrick Demenga, Arturo Bonucci and Julius Berger, the flautist Roberto Fabbriciani , the Amati and Aron quartets, the pianist Massimiliano Damerini, the guitarists Carlos Bonell and Andrea Vettoretti, the tenor Francesco Grollo, the percussionist Tullio De Piscopo and the famous Cuban group “Buena Vista Social Club”. Massimo plays a “lattice braced” guitar, made by Enzo Guido, with Dogal “Maestrale” strings.
Avril Alba is Associate Professor in Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney. She teaches and researches in the areas of Holocaust and modern Jewish history with a focus on Jewish and Holocaust museums. Her monograph, The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2015. From 2002-2011 Avril was the Education Director at the Sydney Jewish Museum where she also served as the Project Director/Curator for the permanent exhibitions Culture and Continuity (2009), The Holocaust (2017) and The Holocaust and Human Rights (2018 with Prof Jennifer Barrett and Prof Dirk Moses). Her current major research project, The Memory of the Holocaust in Australian Public Life is supported by an ARC Discovery Grant.
The presentation will be in ENGLISH.
Free entry. Limited seats.
Booking essential: https://humanitix.com/au