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After you experience these concerts, you won’t believe that with the exception of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night (on the April 11 program), you have never heard any of this music and very likely not even of several of the composers (Zemlinsky, Schreker). — Don Roth, executive director, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts

Don Roth is talking about composers whose works from the late 19th century and early 20th century will be performed next week in two free concerts by Recovered Voices — recovered from the dark shadow of the Third Reich.

A free companion symposium, “Recovering Memory and Culture After the Holocaust,” organized by the Mondavi Center with the support of the UC Davis Jewish Studies Program, will feature talks by James Conlon, artistic director and conductor with the , and two UC Davis scholars: Sven-Erik Rose and Diane Wolf.

In a , Roth describes Conlon — whom he has known well for two decades — as “extraordinary: a great conductor indeed, at ease with wide swaths of the repertoire and someone whose expertise with opera has landed him the top posts in Cologne, Paris and, for the last 17 years, Los Angeles,” as the music director of the LA Opera.

“He also may be one of the most interesting speakers on earth, whose preopera talks in L.A. regularly fill all the lobby spaces in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.”

Conlon launched Recovered Voices as an LA Opera project in 2008, putting on stage long neglected operas by composers whose careers (or lives) had been derailed and shortened by the Nazis.

“It was an amazing project,” Roth wrote. “Among other pieces, rescued from obscurity, the Zemlinsky one-act opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) is as moving and poignant a piece as anything Puccini or Strauss ever wrote.”

Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) will be represented in the Mondavi Center concerts by Maiblumen Blühten Überall (literal translation: Mayflowers Bloomed Everywhere) for Voice and String Sextet. The other featured composers are Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Franz Schreker (1878-1934). See the programs below.

From chat to concerts

In his blog post, Roth said he and Conlon had a brief chat outside the L.A. opera house last year, and from there began to develop the project that comes to fruition with the April 10-11 concerts and symposium.

Roth noted that Mondavi Center Associate Executive Director Jeremy Ganter, who also serves as the director of programming, worked closely with Conlon’s artistic colleagues at Colburn to give final shape to the program.

The musicians performing the old works will be musicians from the Colburn School of Los Angeles, where Recovered Voices found a permanent home in 2013.

“We’ve made these concerts free,” said Roth, crediting generous donors to the Mondavi Center's Artistic