Uploaded April 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Recorded live for webcast at: bit.ly/kingslisten

Performed as part of the Easter at King's Festival, April 2018.

(ZRI:)
Ben Harlan – clarinet
Matthew Sharp – cello
Jon Banks – accordion
Iris Pissaride – santouri

Rosie Hilal – Etty Hillesum
Donal Macleod – narrator

Blazing Harmonies presents the writings of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jew who, like her younger copatriot Anne Frank, in 1941 started writing a diary. Unlike Anne, Etty chose not to hide but to engage and embrace the suffering of her people. It consists of extracts from Etty’s voluminous diaries and letters, interspersed with music from the gypsy band ZRI, whose improvisations add colour and depth to the presentation. The actor Rosie Hilal reads the words of Etty, and Donald Macleod, whose voice is familiar to listeners to BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week, reads the narration.

The phrase ‘Blazing Harmonies’ is one that Etty came up with while writing her diary on the 3rd of April 1942. The paragraph in which she wrote it provides a good introduction to Etty herself and to this presentation:

“Yesterday I suddenly thought: there will always be suffering, and whether one suffers from this or from that really doesn’t make much difference. It is the same with love. One should be less and less concerned with the love object and more and more with the love itself, if it is to be real love. People may grieve more for a cat that has been run over than for the countless victims of a city that has been bombed out of existence. It is not the object but the suffering, the love, the emotions, and the quality of these emotions that count. And the big emotions, those basic harmonies, are always ablaze (‘blazing harmonies’ is not bad!), and every century may stoke the fire with fresh fuels, but all that matters is the warmth of the fire. And the fact that, nowadays, we have yellow stars and concentration camps and terror and war is of secondary importance. And I don’t feel less militant because of this attitude of mine, for moral certainty and moral indignation are also part of the ‘big emotions’.

“But genuine moral indignation must run deep and not be petty personal hatred, for personal hatred usually means little more than using passing incidents as excuses for keeping alive personal hurts, perhaps suffered years ago.”