Toronto ensemble brings forgotten composers out of exile

A Toronto-based ensemble is reviving the music of Second World War-era composers who lived out their lives in exile.

Their efforts seek to reverse the effects of Nazi blacklisting of artists said to be too modern, too socialist or too Jewish.

ARC an ensemble of faculty members of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto are bringing the work of these composers to light with their concert series Music in Exile, which has played to packed houses in London and will end this November with a concert in New York to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous Nazi pogrom of Jews in 1938.

"In 2003 we did a series music of the Holocaust music that had been written in concentration camps or music that had been inspired by concentration camps, and that area of music is very interesting but very well served now," said Simon Wynberg, artistic director of ARC.

"What struck me as particularly interesting was the fact that there were a huge number of composers who had been active in the 1930s or earlier and whose lives went into obscurity because they simply were banned or they were Jewish," he told CBC Radio's cultural affairs show, Q, on Tuesday.

"You couldn't write anything if you were Jewish. It didn't matter if it was modern or avant-garde. If it was Jewish, by definition, it was degenerate."

"Degenerate" was the term given by Nazi Germany to works it wanted to ban for being "un-German." The artists involved were subject to sanctions such as prohibition on performance of their works, and some went into exile.

"Atthe front of musical experimentation was Arnold Schoenberg, the kind of enfant terrible of music and his followers. The Nazis held him up as a prime example of degenerate music," said Wynberg.

Schoenberg and his follower Kurt Weill went to the U.S., where Schoenberg was able to rebuild his career.

Deliverance from obscurity

But other composers weren't so lucky, among them Yulius Rontgen, who went to the Netherlands and continued writing, but whose work lapsed into obscurity.

ARC has recorded two discs featuring the works by Rontgen and Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who fled to Moscow where he was persecuted by Stalin.

"Rontgen died before Nazis came to power, but the atmosphere of Hitler's time prevented his music from being heard after the war," Wynberg said.

"What happened after the war was that music became very experimental and very avant garde. Conservative composers were pushed to the side and Rontgen was a victim of that."

On the Threshold of Hope: Chamber Music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a recordingby ARC, was nominated for a Grammy for best chamber music.

ARC has a multiple recording contract with Sony BMG Masterworks, one of the few chamber ensembles in the world with a record deal. Their second recording was Right Through the Bone: Chamber Music of Julius Rontgen.

All of these composers are being heard by the public again in the Music in Exile series, which has been well received throughout Europe.

"It's a wonderful opportunity to expose music that is of equal quality to other music written at the time but is unknown," said viola player Steven Dann.

"Being a violist, we're all champions of unknown composers only unknown composers wrote for the viola, so it's always fantastic to come up with new material."

Dann said people are less influenced now by the fashions that dominated classical music in the 1930s. and they're also intrigued by the music's backstory.

"It's partly the context in our time. Our world is so tangled right now and that world was equally tangled," Dann said.