“He would go on for one note, and you wanted to cry”: the 120th anniversary of the Lithuanian violin legend is being celebrated | Culture

“I have heard Pomeranz play tango since childhood. It was thanks to the tango that I appreciated Pomeranz’s emotions. He wasn’t that crazy virtuoso with “flying” fingers, he didn’t need to be. He continued one note, and you wanted to cry,” recalls Jūratė Dineikaitė, violinist and founder of the girl rock group “Bites”.

Although D. Pomeranc’s name was remembered in Lithuania around the 1990s, his life and work, like most other Lithuanian Jewish musicians, have not been thoroughly researched until now, and the concise information regarding him presented in various publications often differs.

Photo from the personal archive of Danutė Pomerancaitė/Danielius Pomerancas

On the occasion of the violinist’s 120th birthday, musicologist dr. On April 17, Kamilė Rupeikaitė will give a lecture “Between facts and memory: the search for the biography of violinist Daniel Pomerancs” at the Museum of Lithuanian Jewish Culture and Identity.

In it, the lecturer will share the new facts of D. Pomeranc’s life that have emerged in recent years, which in turn raise even more questions: why the reconstruction of Pomeranc’s biography is so difficult; in which family the future violin virtuoso grew up and where he studied; what really connects him with Willy Hess, one of the most famous German violin pedagogues of the Weimar period; what was the fate of his relatives during the holocaust?

These and other questions will be discussed in the lecture based on material found in Lithuanian and foreign archives, reviews in the interwar and later press, memories of the violinist’s daughter Dana Pomerants-Mazurkevich and contemporaries.

K. Rupeikaitė is a senior researcher at the Lithuanian Cultural Research Institute and an associate professor at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater, the author of the monograph “Dialogues: Composer Anatolijus Šenderovas” (2020).

Mindaugas Klus photo. / Daniel Pomeranc’s violin is exhibited in the museum

In the memory of his contemporaries, Pomeranz remained as an extremely skilled and original musician, as well as a skillful manager. In 1936, at the London music recording company “Columbia”, the orchestra led by D. Pomeranc with the musicians of the recording studio orchestra and soloist Antans Dvarionas recorded 11 records – a set of tangos, waltzes, foxtrots that are fashionable in the world.

During the Nazi occupation, D. Pomerancs was imprisoned in the Kaunas ghetto, in the Dachau concentration camp. In Kaunas, together with Moiše Hofmekler, he organized an orchestra of 40 musicians from the ghetto prisoners, which organized large symphonic music programs.

After the war, having escaped the tragic fate of many Jews, he played in the Kaunas operetta, in the “Tulpė” cafe, and later in the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. In 1974, he emigrated to Canada.

Dr. K. Rupeikaitė’s lecture “Between facts and memory: the search for the biography of violinist Danielias Pomerancs” will be held on April 17, at 6 p.m. at the Museum of Lithuanian Jewish Culture and Identity (Pylimo str. 4A).