Concertgebouw plays in concentration camp
mainMembers of the orchestra played this weekend at Kamp Vught – now a national monument – to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Marius Flothuis, artistic director from 1955 until 1974.
Flothuis (1914-2001) an assistant at the orchestra from 1937, was incarcerated in Kamp Vught in 1942 over his resistance to the German occupation. A prolific composer, he was an important mentor to Bernard Haitink in his early years as music director.
I was touched to read of this tribute to a wonderful man, musician and scholar. Dr. Flothuis was a guest professor at the University of Southern California School of Music in the early 1970s when I was a graduate student there. There were unforgettable seminars led by him on the Mozart piano concertos (he edited the volume devoted to these works in the Neue Mozart Ausgabe), and on “Schubert the Innovator”. His wife, Rose, always sat at the back of the classroom to listen. I knew that she had been imprisoned in a concentration camp, but did not know that he had been as well.
When I performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat, KV 482, I played the tasteful and style-appropriate cadenzas and “lead-ins” by Marius Flothuis.