One starlit night four years ago, in the ruins of Santa Cruz Church, the Manila Symphony Orchestra gave its first concert since the Japanese invasion. In the audience were eight G.I.s from Brooklyn who never forgot the concert or its conductor: Vienna-born Dr. Herbert Zipper, who had survived Hitler's Dachau and Buchenwald, and two of Tojo's Philippine hellholes.
A year later, back home in Brooklyn, they heard that Conductor Zipper was in the U.S. on a cultural mission for the Philippines. They buttonholed him with a proposition: if they could form a Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, would he stay and conduct it? Said...
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