Skip to main content

“Make once more my heart thy home”: The Choral Music of Hans Gál

Date
Date
Sunday 5 June 2016
Location
Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT

Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish Music and Theatre
Performing the Jewish Archive: Looking Forward through the Past
University of Leeds International Concert Series

Hans Gál (1890­–1987) was one of a generation of Austrian Jewish composers forced to flee when the Nazis invaded the country. No stranger to composing for the voice, he produced four operas, several solo songs, and some 27 works for choir, alongside a large amount of orchestral and instrumental music.

A private student of Eusebius Mandyczewski (a close friend of Johannes Brahms), Gál immersed himself in the Austro-German classical tradition stemming from Bach, Schütz, Mozart, and Beethoven. Dismissed by the Nazis from the directorship of the Mainz Conservatory in 1933, and his works subsequently banned, Gál and his family fled Austria in 1938, settling in Edinburgh. Despite a period of internment as “enemy alien”, Gál became a regular Edinburgh musical figure, helping to establish the International Festival in 1947.

This programme, part of the international festival of music and theatre Out of the Shadows, celebrates Gál’s love of choral music (he had founded the Vienna Madrigal Society in 1927), placing some of his own works amidst the music he most admired.  Schütz, Haydn, Schumann and Brahms sit alongside five of Gál’s most diverse choral works, from serious settings of texts by Matthias Claudius, Shakespeare, Blake, and Ben Johnson, to lighter, often humorous settings of texts by Lessing, Shelley, and Queen Elizabeth I

As, the Clothworkers Consort presents a performance of music by Hans Gál, placing him in the context of the German choral tradition from which he emerged, and according him his rightful place in the history of German choral music.

PROGRAMME

  • Hans Gál – Motette, op. 19
  • Heinrich Schütz – Selig sind die Toten   
  • Hans Gál – Epigramme, op. 27           
  • Joseph Haydn -  Die Harmonie in der Ehe     
  • Hans Gál – Four Partsongs for mixed voices (posth.)
  • Robert Schumann – Gute Nacht           
  • Hans Gál – Drei Gesänge, op. 37       
  • Johannes Brahms - Schaffe in mir Gott   
  • Hans Gál – Four Madrigals for mixed voices, op. 51

BOOKING DETAILS TO FOLLOW