A collection of poetry about romantic love, betrayal, and optimistic aspirations of far-off locations that were penned in a concentration camp are being brought to life in album form by the author’s granddaughter and performed in Czech.
The 2022 release “Thieves of Dreams” by Lenka Lichtenberg will compete at the Juno Awards the next weekend in the category for world music album of the year.
The CD, which combines jazz and chamber music, is inspired by poetry written by her grandmother, Anna Hana Friesova, while she was a prisoner of war in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Also, it is a finalist for the Oliver Schroer Pushing the Boundaries Award and the Global Roots Album of the Year awards at the upcoming Canadian Folk Music Awards.
She then received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council to commission musicians for the album.
“Thieves of Dreams” features arrangements from 19 musicians from the Czech Republic, Canada and Germany. But working on the album during the COVID-19 pandemic meant she wasn’t able to spend time together with the others in a studio.
However, pandemic restrictions that shut down live events also meant musicians were itching to get involved in musical collaborations, even if it meant working out of their home studios.
“I found people extremely receptive and eager to do stuff and that was a real pleasure,” she said.
She would make a track with her vocals and keyboard accompaniment and send it to her collaborators, including Canadian bassist George Koller, who would then add his instrumentals and send it back. That approach was applied to the other collaborations and was how the album was put together.
“The variety of sounds that comes in the album is a result of that kind of approach,” she said.
When she started to read the poems, she said she could envision her grandmother going through various emotions such as passion, love and disappointment. Lichtenberg said her grandmother wrote about how her marriage to her grandfather was falling apart and how she felt at a loss. Her grandfather, Richard Friesova, was executed in a gas chamber on Oct. 10, 1944 in Auschwitz.
