“When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard,” wrote Bertolt Brecht, an astute chronicler of the most inhuman period of the 20th century.

The GNO Alternative Stage recital titled The Sound of the Cry, conceived by the enterprising pianist and researcher Christos Marinos, accompanying the restless mezzo-soprano Ioanna Vrakatseli, sets out to give, precisely, sound to the cry of people who experienced, or are still experiencing, some of the most acute humanitarian crises of the 20th and 21st centuries; such as the Great Fire of Smyrna, the Holocaust and the ongoing refugee crisis.

Two commissioned works by the Greek composers Foteini Tryferopoulou and Maria Deli are centrally positioned in the recital programme; they deal with, respectively, the Great Fire of Smyrna and its attendant genocides and the testimonies of survivors of wars, ethnic cleansing and slaughters. The new works are flanked by compositions, sometimes in first performances, by creators such as Ilse Weber, Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann (who lived through the Theresienstadt ghetto only to die at Auschwitz) as well as their contemporary colleagues Juliana Hall, Mohammed Fairouz and Dimitri Terzakis – all of them devastating evidence of man’s inhumanity to man.