January 21 and 22, 2017: Violinist Daniel Hope played the West Coast premiere of I Will Not Remain Silent (violin concerto inspired by the life of Joachim Prinz) with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra conducted by Jeffrey Kahane.

In an article on Violinist.com, Daniel Hope commented about the concerto:

The violin concerto “I Will Not Remain Silent” is “a fantastic, extremely passionate, lyrical concerto that tells the story of a fascinating man,” Hope told me on Tuesday by phone in LA. The piece, written by Bruce Adolphe, tells the story of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who escaped Hitler’s Germany to settle in the United States. “(Prinz) believed passionately that the worst thing you could do was to remain silent. He spoke up against racism, against prejudice and against what was happening, both in Nazi Germany, and then in the 1950s and 60s in the United States, when he became a very vocal candidate for human rights.”

“He didn’t draw any boxes around different types of oppression,” Hope said, “oppression was oppression for him.”

In the concerto, which Hope will play next weekend with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Adolphe attempts to demonstrate two different worlds: the world of 1930s Germany and the Berlin of the Nazis; and the world of Civil Rights-era America and Martin Luther King. “He’s done that in an extremely refined way, by switching gears musically,” Hope said. The piece has two movements, each one representing those different times. “He’s blended spirituals and songs from the Civil Rights movement, which he’s very cleverly woven into the texture of the second movement. In the same way, (in the first movement) he’s taken the sounds of Berlin and the sounds of war — from explosions to gunshots to all the rest of it, coming out from the orchestra. The violin is in the center, the voice of this rabbi, Prinz, who is constantly trying to stay above what’s going on. The piece is really like a historical journey, a terrific piece.”