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Published: 08 July 2010
by SEBASTIAN TAYLOR

CAMDEN-based musicians are arranging a concert later this month to raise money for the Helen Bamber Foundation human rights charity.

Centrepiece of the July 19 fundraiser at the Wigmore Hall is a Song Cycle by composer Michael Zev Gordon. It uses works by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose  damn­ing criticism of Stalin eventually led to his death on the way to the Gulag. Young mezzo Catherine Hopper, a long-time Hampstead resident, premiered the work at last year’s Cheltenham Music Festival and will be singing the piece again at its London premiere. She will be accom­panied by pianist Julius Drake, from West Hampstead, and the Song Cycle will be introduced by the Polish writer Eva Hoffman, the Hampstead author of Lost in Translation. 

The concert is being sponsored by Johanna Rosendaal, a Dartmouth Park resident. “The idea to commission Michael Zev Gordon to set some poems of Osip Mandel­stam to music came from thinking about members of my family who fled Nazi Germany only to return to life in Commun­ist East Germany,” she says. “I wanted a memorial in music to all those who have suffered and continue to suffer from political oppression, a memorial to people whose right to free speech was and is denied by tyrannical governments.”

The second half of the concert is Beet­hov­en’s late B Flat String Quartet Op 130 and its original finale, the Grosse Fuge.

Proceeds go to the Helen Bamber Found­ation, the Bloomsbury-based trust supporting victims of  human rights violations.

• Helen Bamber Foundation fund­raiser, Wigmore Hall, Wigmore Street, W1, 020 7935 2141,
July 19, 7.30pm, tickets from £12