The ARC Ensemble - the acronym stands for Artists of the Royal Conservatory - brings together senior faculty members at the Conservatory's Glenn Gould School. With artistic director Simon Wynberg, ARC extends its Music in Exile series of programmes featuring music directly influenced by Nazi German terror and Europe's social and political history around the Second World War. Earlier editions of the series have been presented in Toronto, Tel Aviv, Budapest and New York City. The ARC disc On the Threshold of Hope brings together three works by composer Mieczysław Weinberg written between 1944-45, after he fled Poland at the beginning of the war to live in the USSR.
Music in Exile is an ongoing series of concerts, lectures and films launched in 2006 that explore the works and the context of musicians who fled Nazi-occupied Europe during the 1930s, as well as those who stayed behind and resisted the regime. The 2013 edition showcases once again the works of Mieczysław Weinberg, along with those of Szymon Laks, Paul Ben-Haim and Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn's music was regarded as "entartete musik" - degenerate music - by the Third Reich. Upcoming concerts feature the Sonata in D major (1847)
Paul Ben-Haim was born in Germany, where he studied conducting and composition. He was an assistant to Hans Knappertsbuscha - an outstanding conductor, known for directing performances of Richard Wagner's music. Ben-Haim emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1933, and was one of the most important Israeli composers, his style characterised by a Romantic scope blended with themes from Jewish music. The concerts feature his Piano Quartet, written a year prior to his emigration to the Middle East.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg was born in 1919 in Warsaw. He came from a musical family - his father was a composer and director of the Jewish Theatre. At age 10 Weinberg gave his first concert; two years later, he began studying piano at the conservatory, then under the direction of Karol Szymanowski. He was the only member of his family to escape to the Soviet Union in 1939 - his relatives died in the camp in Trawniki. The ARC Ensemble is to perform Weinberg's Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, op. 28 (1945).
Weinberg became an important figure in Soviet musical life and was widely recognised as composer and performer of film music. The recent rediscovery of Weinberg's concert music continues - there are 22 symphonies and several operas among his prolific output. Most acclaimed among these works is the opera The Passenger, brought to the Bregenze Festival in 2010 then to the English National Opera stage in a production directed by David Pountney. The production was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award, the most prestigious British theatre prize.
Szymon Laks composed his String Quartet on Polish Folk Themes in 1945. Laks was born in 1901 in Warsaw into the family of assimilated Jews. He went to Paris in the 1920s, where he studied at the Conservatoire National. Laks was looking for a new style of music combining classical music with currents of popular music and folk - one hears the blues, jazz and Polish and Jewish folklore in his works.
Before the war, Laks wrote music for several films, but his career was cut short when hostilities broke out. He returned to Paris, was arrested by the Nazi authorities and held in a camp near Orleans. He was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942. He was a member then conductor of the famous band that performed in Auschwitz. He composed his Quartet immediately after the liberation of Paris, which takes a nostalgic turn on green pastures and landscapes, with sudden jerks of misery brought on by the painful memories of the war.
The ARC Ensemble performs its 2013 Music in Exile programme at the Mazzoleni Concert Hall in Toronto on the 5th of March and at London's Wigmore Hall on the 10th of March.
For more information, see: www.arcensemble.com
Author: Philip Lech. Translated by Agnieszka Le Nart, with additional information from arcensemble.com