Each time Director of Orchestras Victor Yampolsky enters the concert hall to start a new piece, he holds his left hand to his chest and lifts his head high. He raises his arms toward the ceiling and his body leans forward, and the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra follows his lead with harmonious sounds from the Romantic Era.

Yampolsky brought his passion and effortless leadership for music conduction to Pick-Staiger Concert Hall on Saturday night with the Symphony Orchestra.

The two-hour concert, which corresponded to an exhibit dedicated to Holocaust artwork at the Block Museum of Art, highlighted two World War II works by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu.

Yampolsky said he possesses a personal connection to Martinu’s works. Born in Russia in 1942 during World War II’s famous Battle of Stalingrad, Yampolsky was named Victor in hopes of an eventual triumph of the Allies.

“I’m very much connected to music of the ’40s and ’50s, simply because that music coincides with a time when I started to recognize myself consciously,” Yampolsky said. “It’s a time which I call black and white — a time of no colors. It was a very gloomy time in our lives.”

“Memorial to Lidice,” one of Martinu’s intensely emotional and personal works, was written in response to the genocide of 340 people in a small town of Czechoslovakia.

In addition, Martinu completed his “Symphony No. 3,” also performed by the orchestra, on D-Day while he lived in exile in Connecticut.

“His pieces represent exactly the mood of tremendous loss, tragedy and overwhelming desire to overcome it,” Yampolsky said.

Yampolsky, a music performance studies professor, immigrated to the United States 29 years ago and has worked at NU for 18 years.

“These pieces of work have sentimental value in my own upbringing as a young man and musician,” Yampolsky said. “This is music which really changed me into a professional conductor.”

The Symphony Orchestra also performed Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture” and Brahms’ “Symphony No. 3,” one of the first pieces Yampolsky learned.

Although Beethoven and Brahms’ works were not written during World War II, both pieces deal with themes of the “triumph of human experience,” Yampolsky said.

“All of (this music) is actually devoted to one essential question of human existence,” he said. “It exists equally in all four works.”

The audience responded enthusiastically to the concert.

“It was very impressive — the overall commitment to the music by the students,” said Jared Davis, a Music graduate student.

Yampolsky ended the concert the same way he began — with stoic posture and intense concentration. He graciously bowed during the audience’s thunderous applause, then raised his left hand again, this time to cross his heart, and uttered the words “thank you.”