Nicola Lisle talks to the composer James Whitbourn about his choral setting of The Diary of Anne Frank

When James Whitbourn was asked to work on a new choral piece based on the famous wartime diary of Holocaust victim Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank, the idea immediately appealed.

The project was the brainchild of Exeter College graduate Melanie Challenger, and together the pair set about producing a unique adaptation of this moving account of Nazi persec-ution through the eyes of a young girl.

“Our ambition was not just to do a work using the story of Anne Frank, because that’s freely available, but to see whether we could get permission to use The Diary of Anne Frank,” James says. “That permission had never been granted before for a major choral work as a copyright text.”

Permission to use the text was granted, but what made the project really poignant was the involvement of Anne’s family and friends — most notably Anne’s cousin, actor Bernd ‘Buddy’ Elias.

“That affected the whole nature of the piece,” says James. “It became, for me, more like writing the music for a personal family memorial service than for international music critics.”

Annelies premiered in 2005, the 60th anniversary of the closure of Ausch-witz and of Anne’s death. Now, with this year marking the 70th anniversary of Anne’s arrest and the end of her diary, the piece is once more topical.

But Annelies is not intended to be a Holocaust piece, although of course the context is unavoidable.

“I like to think of it as a personal, commemorative portrait,” James says. “It’s a piece of musical portraiture of that young girl between 1942 and 1944. It doesn’t deal with the time in Ausch-witz or Bergen-Belsen. It’s a portrait of a very alive young girl who is full of vit-ality. It’s not a gloomy piece, but we’re all aware of the cloud that hangs over it.

The entire diary couldn’t be set to music, so how did he and Melanie decide which texts to use?

“I think one of the reasons the diary is so compelling is it’s a mixture of everyday, little girl observations and the growing girl observations, and these incredibly deep, penetrating observations. And Anne herself refers, in the last entry of the diary, to her finer side. So we decided to focus the libretto in her extra-ordinary, mature obser-vations. Otto Frank, her father, said in an inter-view that when he first read the diary he realised he didn’t know his daughter, because these pages show a completely different side to her, and it’s that side that forms the basis of this libretto.”

James originally wrote Annelies for soprano soloist, choir and orchestra, but has since reworked it as a chamber piece for piano trio and clarinet accompaniment. It is this version that will be presented at SJE Arts next week.

Performers include the Williamson Voices from the Westminster Choir College in America, together with Welsh soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, clarinettist Thomas Hull and the Aquinas Piano Trio. James Whitbourn will conduct.

“It’s just 75 minutes, so it’s a short, complete concert with no interval,” he says. “The idea is that people come and listen and experience the piece, and that’s it. So it’s not a long concert. It’s the sort of concert length that I rather like myself!”

Annelies
SJE Arts at St John the Evangelist Church, Iffley Road
Tuesday, 7.30pm
Tickets: Visit www.sje-oxford.org