A Conversation About <em>Four for Gideon</em> with Michael Schachter

Four for Gideon, composed by American Michael Schachter, is a new setting for four Czech and Polish folk songs, with tunes previously arranged by Gideon Klein (1919–1945) during his imprisonment in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) Ghetto, a concentration camp in the present-day Czech Republic. Klein served as a music director there before being transferred to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Four for Gideon was commissioned by the Standford Eisenberg Jewish Day School in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was premiered by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra (Aram Demirjian, music director) on March 5, 2025, in a performance in honor of Violins of Hope, which collects and preserves violins, violas, and cellos of the World War II era that often belonged to survivors of the Holocaust and their families. Michael Schacter is interviewed here by Dr. Michael Beckerman, a musicologist and the dean of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Readers can listen to Four for Gideon performed by the Salina (Kansas) Symphony, conducted by Yaniv Segal on the symphony’s YouTube channel.