Hope’s Mission: soloist honors a musician killed under Nazi regime

Daniel Hope is an artist with a mission.

15 years ago,  he was driving in his car when heard an string trio on the radio, a music he was not familiar with. “I pulled over to hear the name of the composer — it was Gideon Klein,” Hope recalled, and Googled the name when he came home.

Hope discovered the composer, was a Czech native musician who was  born in 1919 to Jewish parents. But following a short and impressive  career, the composer died at the age of 26 inside a concentration camp.

Inspired by the music and the tragic loss, Hope decided to devote  much of his own career as a soloist to championing works by composers whose careers and lives were cut short by the Nazi’s.  On Wednesday April 7, 2010,  Hope will perform a concert with members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Schoenberg Hall at UCLA. The concert will feature music by Erwin Schulhoff, the Jewish composer who was imprisoned by the Nazis and ultimately died at a concentration camp in 1942. Hope believes that Schulhoff’s music is “powerful” regardless of the story connected to it.