Last Train to Tomorrow, composed by Carl Davis, at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester in 2025.
Monday 27th January at 7.15 pm
Tuesday 28th January at 2.15 pm
Tuesday 28th January at 7.15 pm
TO MARK THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF CHICHESTER MARKS HOLOCAUST DAY, THIS INCREDIBLY MOVING MUSICAL PIECE, WRITTEN BY CARL DAVIS, WILL RETURN FOR A SERIES OF SPECIAL PERFORMANCES – 27-28 JANUARY 2025
Next year, in 2025, Chichester Marks Holocaust Memorial Day reaches its 10-year anniversary, and it will also be the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. To mark these events the Charity is reprising the performance of ‘The Last Train to Tomorrow’, written by Carl Davis and first performed by the Charity in 2016 at Chichester Cathedral with Carl conducting a Chichester University orchestra and a cast of local school children. The performance attracted an audience of over 500 people.
This will be the first time that piece will have been performed since Carl’s death last year, and his daughter Jessie will be our guest of honour. ‘The Last Train to Tomorrow’ is a musical piece that tells the story of the flight of 10,000 children from atrocities in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Some of the children were put on Kindertransport rescue trains from Prague to London in 1938/39 organised by Sir Nicholas Winton, and made it to safety leaving their families to face the fate of the death camps.
There will be 3 performances at The Minerva Theatre, Chichester spread over Monday 27th January (an evening performance) and Tuesday 28th January 2025 (Matinee and evening performances) with professional musicians conducted by the renowned composer Howard Moody accompanied by singers from local schools. Our aim is to provide local school children with the opportunity to perform, both singing and acting, a renowned musical piece and to experience working with professional musicians in a professional theatre setting.
To book your tickets, please visit the Festival Theatre’s website here:
https://www.cft.org.uk/events/the-last-train-to-tomorrow#the-show
The matinee performance on Tuesday 28th January is intended for children from local schools. The opera will be complemented by film showings at New Park Cinema, Chichester, for local school children on Thursday 23rd January and Friday 24th January. The films to be shown are ‘Where is Anne Frank’ and ‘One Life’ which also tells the story of the Kindertransport rescue trains organised by Sir Nicholas Winton. Before and after each film screening there will be workshops for the children attending, concentrating on Human Rights education, encouraging tolerance and understanding in order to help prevent further acts of genocide and Human Rights violations. It is very important that we always have children involved in our productions. They come to understand human rights violations and then go back to their schools to tell their fellow students about their experience and how vital education on these important issues is.
Since 2016 we have worked to mark and keep memories alive with a variety of activities including screenings, talks and community-based performance for people of all ages and backgrounds. We work in partnership with schools, community groups and organisations – including Chichester Cathedral, the University of Chichester, Chichester Festival Theatre and Chichester City Council We have been proud to stage Howard Moody’s opera PUSH, featuring local choirs, the story of a young boy pushed by his Mother from a train bound for Auschwitz in order to save his life. PUSH was performed in Chichester Cathedral, Chichester Theatre and The House of Commons. In addition we have bought The Mozart Question by Sir Michael Morpugo, Women Who Resisted by Kate Mosse and Kate Mosse in conversation with David Nott (world renowned surgeon in war zones) to an ever increasing audience in Chichester.
Our over-riding theme for our theatre production, film screenings and workshops will be The Holocaust Memorial Trust’s theme for 2025 – ‘For a Better Future’.
Last Train to Tomorrow in the words of Carl Davis (Composer)
In 2009 the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester approached me to write a work for their whiz-bang Children’s Choir. My answer was an immediate ‘yes’ and an idea followed swiftly. I had in mind the underlying theme of the Kindertransport Movement of 1938-39 – children abandoned and saved by a quirk of history. The shape of the choir stalls at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall seemed to echo the dimensions of a railway carriage. When filled with a hundred or so children it could recreate the critical scenes from the Kindertransport story – the rescue by train from three key cities, Prague, Vienna and Berlin, of thousands of Jewish children from inevitable death at the hands of the Nazis, to safety in England.
How to tell the story? Spoken narrative seemed obvious but perhaps a more original way would be to have the children themselves tell what happened to them. I turned to an experienced writer of children’s books, Hiawyn Oram, who had previously collaborated with me on musicals and songs specifically for children to perform. We were both very moved by the story and at times could barely talk about it for emotion but we both set to work reading purposefully the many accounts written by survivors. What evolved was a sequence of songs (we looked carefully at Schubert’s song cycles) each of which moves the story further along. The events that preceded the train journey from the three cities to London’s Liverpool Street Station are told in flashback, young actors linking the set pieces with historical context. The work ends with the arrival of the children at Liverpool Street Station as they face a new life in England.
Writing the Music. Now what about the music? First, the sound; I wanted to limit the range of sonorities, a sort of black and white feel, so no woodwinds or brass. I chose strings, percussion and piano four hands – the stark line-up present in many interwar concert works. And the style? I thought of what music the children might know from their life before the journey. Of course they would have heard, and the older children played, the classical masters but also the popular music of the day, sometimes rather Broadway-ish, as well as Jewish songs, hinting at tragic separation and tempered with humour and I knew the work had to end optimistically in a major key. After all, thanks to the British, these children were saved from the camps, a cause for celebration.
After the Manchester premiere in 2012, the second performance was in Prague in 2013. The orchestra was the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and the choir, the Children’s Opera Prague. The work was translated into Czech and brilliantly sung and staged. Following a hunch I asked if they sang in English. ‘Yes we can’ was the reply and I then decided that there might be an additional level of authenticity in recording the ‘Last Train…’ with them, Czech children singing in English.
Writing the words. Carl approached me in 2009 after the Hallé Orchestra had asked him to conceive and compose a work for their Children’s Choir. His chosen subject was the Kindertransport Movement of 1938-39 and it was going to need words, he said, spoken and sung.
I knew little about the subject but in the first weeks of researching, reading personal accounts and watching a remarkable Academy Award- winning film, ‘INTO THE ARMS OF STRANGERS,’ I became so distressed that I was on the verge of saying I couldn’t do it. I pulled myself up and together, over many months during which I discovered he was equally disturbed by the survivors’ stories, we managed to get our emotions sufficiently under control to create what has become LAST TRAIN – a dramatic narrative for Children’s Choir, Actors and Orchestra.
It was a charged and wonderful experience working with Carl. His innate sense of theatre and the language of his composition and orchestrations add levels and meaning to words and story which can take the breath away. Tears may have been spilled writing LAST TRAIN but nothing can come close to the suffering of the young people who survived Nazi persecution and sudden separation from their families. I only hope we’ve captured something of it in this re-telling.
Hiawyn Oram London 2014
To book your tickets, please visit the Festival Theatre’s website here:
https://www.cft.org.uk/events/the-last-train-to-tomorrow#the-show