The musician and composer Ignacio Amil will premiere this Thursday at 20 in the Buenos Aires Usina del Arte the “Antek Suite” for bandoneon, piano and orchestra, a work that pays his grandfather Antonio Szkudlarek and the testimony of his life that included the decisive passage through the Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee concentration and extermination camps.
“About three years ago, when I retrieved the document where my grandfather was reviewing his life, I was struck by the fact that I had to do something with it. That it was something historical that somehow had to be shared and then I began to imagine how to make everything that was narrated sound like, the sensations and feelings around all that horror ”, reveals Amil to Télam.
The pianist assumes the type of challenge undertaken to assume this story and asks himself “What does an arm tattoo sound like? And the loss of identity or a mock shooting? How do you hear that they make you shovel bodies for a truck to take them away?”.
“This whole process had a final injection of energy to finish the work when I received the call from the Orquesta del Centro to perform the premiere concert”, reviews the artist and grandson of Antek.
On Friday from 20 in the communal space but with tickets for sale through passline.com, Amil will be presented together with the training led by Jonathan Tolcachier and also with the bandoneon player Nicolas Enrich to tackle a repertoire of jazz character.
“The ‘Antek Suite’ -count- is born As a result of a testimonial document that my grandfather left us, in which he narrates his life before the concentration camps, his time there and his subsequent arrival in Buenos Aires in six themes”.
-What memories do you have of how your grandfather told you about his confinement in the Nazi death camps?
– My grandfather did not speak much of the confinement in himself. He told us more about his life before and after. From his childhood in the forests of Lodz or the choice to come to Argentina since it was a country where at that time “food was not going to be lacking” and “people ate very well”. He was a super happy person who preferred to open a wine, chat and laugh for a while rather than tell about the horror that had happened. If I remember an anecdote he told us about when he looked in the mirror for the first time after his recovery in the hospital and started crying because he did not recognize himself. He weighed 40 kilos when he was 20 years old and 1.85 meters tall. They carried him up the stairs to the first floor of the hospital because he could not walk yet. This is one of the images that I tried to translate into music.
-Do you plan to record this suite?
-We hope to be able to record it in 2022 and also present it in different places in Argentina and hopefully on some stages in Europe as well.
-How is this work linked to your path more linked to jazz?
-My training is mainly jazz, but at the same time I studied academic composition. Particularly in this work I wanted to try sounds more related to contemporary music that I had not managed to touch or capture much in my compositions until now. In any case, jazz is always an inescapable influence.
