Marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Sky Arts commissioned The Lost Music of Auschwitz, telling the story of composer Leo Geyer’s eight-year mission to piece together a treasure-trove of forgotten fragments of music manuscripts found in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. Leo conducts Constella Music, an orchestra he founded, finally to play the music he has painstakingly uncovered, exactly as it would have sounded at Auschwitz, in some cases for the first time in 80 years. Auschwitz-Birkenau was home to at least six orchestras, formed of prisoners and commissioned by the SS. Many of the manuscripts they left behind are almost too faint to read, while others are damaged beyond recognition. The film follows Leo on this musical journey as he discovers how the musicians rebelled with secret performances, weaving forbidden melodies into concerts. The film is interwoven with powerful interviews with some of the last remaining survivors, and special performances from Leo’s orchestra.
The Lost Music of Auschwitz / Tom Cook - Photo: SKY
Exhibit
The Lost Music of Auschwitz
Tom Cook (GB)
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Tom Cook / Windfall Films
Tom Cook
Tom is a multi-award winning director and executive producer (Emmy, RTS, Jackson Hole, Wildscreen). He has worked on some of Windfall’s most ambitious programmes, from Dambusters: Building the Bouncing Bomb, to Your Inner Fish and the Eurovision Song Contest Postcards. In his time at Windfall he has produced hit series such as Lost Treasures of Egypt and Building Giants, as well as a wide variety of highly successful one-offs such as This World: Why Ships Crash, Horizon: Body Clock: What Makes Us Tick, and Chris Packham’s The British Garden: Life and Death on your Lawn.
Credits
Windfall Films (Argonon) production for Sky Arts. | Executive Producer Dan Kendall, Director Tom Cook, Editor Emily West. | Music services are provided by Constella Music, Composer and Conductor—Leo Geyer. | Commissioned by Phil Edgar-Jones, Executive Director of Unscripted Originals at Sky, for Cecile Frot-Coutaz, CEO of Sky Studios & Chief Content Officer for Sky. The Commissioning Editor is Barbara Lee.
