Journeys in Jewish Choral Music
- Date
- Friday 25 November 2016
- Location
- Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall
School of Music Choir directed by Stephen Muir
Germany to Australia; Russia to South Africa and Finland; Austria to Britain. These are just some of the journeys taken by Jewish composers in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. Journeys of hope for a new start in a foreign land; journeys of fear for the future and the consequences of staying at home.
Drawing on the work of researchers from the international project Performing the Jewish Archive, this performance charts the fate of four musicians (and their music) who fled the impending horrors of the Nazi regime. With perhaps one exception, their names are largely unfamiliar – Werner Baer, Froim Spektor, Simon Parmet, Hans Gál – but their considerable achievements belie their near posthumous anonymity.
From synagogue music to secular part-songs; concert anthems to Yiddish folksongs. These composers’ music was suppressed or assumed lost after the Holocaust for a variety of complex reasons, many of them (prejudice, discrimination, anti-Semitism) uncomfortably familiar to us today. In many cases the music will receive its modern-day premier, furthering our understanding of the journeys undertaken by émigré composers and the personalities behind the music.