When Australian composer Lee Bradshaw was approached by Jack Liebeck, the Artistic Director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, about a possible co-commission with the Brundibár Arts Festival in the UK, he was naturally keen to hear more – but surprised that Liebeck knew about him.

“I believe a couple of friends may have mentioned me,” he tells Limelight. “Anyway, I got an email and next thing we were having a Zoom meeting, all three of us – Jack, Sasha (Alexandra) Raikhlina, the Artistic Director of the Brundibár Arts Festival, and me – and they were chatting away about this person, Gideon Klein, as if I knew he was.”

Lee Bradshaw

Lee Bradshaw. Photo © Peter M. Lamont

“Embarrassingly, I had to say, ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’ But that is a part of what Brundibár Arts Festival is about – drawing awareness to the composers who were imprisoned at the Theresienstadt ghetto in Terezín,” explains Bradshaw.

Born in 1919, Klein was a Czech pianist and composer. In December 1941, he was deported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp and ghetto established by the Nazis in occupied Czechoslovakia, where he helped...