‘Make once more my heart thy home’: A composer in exile

‘OUT OF THE SHADOWS’

Music and Theatre from the Jewish archive

Spanish Synagogue, Prague

Official festival opening

Hans Gál was one of a generation of Jewish composers forced to flee Austria when the Nazis invaded. This programme celebrates Gál’s love of choral music, placing his own settings of poems by Shakespeare, Blake, Johnson, Shelley, and Queen Elizabeth I amidst the music he most admired, including Schütz, Haydn, Schumann and Brahms. The concert will be introduced by Gál’s daughter, Eva Fox-Gál.

Performers: Clothworkers Consort of Leeds (UK), conducted by Bryan White

In collaboration with the Jewish Museum in Prague.

• Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), Selig sind die Toten[Blessed are the dead], SWV391 (1648)
• Johannes Brahms (1833-97), ‘Schaffe in mir Gott’ [Create in me, God], from Zwei Motetten [Two motets], Op. 29 no. 2 (1864)
• Robert Schumann (1810-56), ‘Gute Nacht’ [Good night], from Vier Gesänge [Four songs], Op. 59 no. 4 (1846)
• Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), ‘Die Harmonie in der Ehe’ [Harmony in marriage], from Aus des Ramlers Lyrischer Blumenlese [From Ramler’s Lyrical Harvest of Flowers], Hob.XXVc:2 (1796)
• Hans Gál (1890-1987), ‘Stilleben’ [Still Life], from Epigramme [Epigrams], op. 27 no. 1 (1926)
• Hans Gál, Four Madrigals to Elizabethan Poems, Op. 51 (1939)

1. ‘Youth and Cupid’
2. ‘True Love’
3. ‘A Cradle Song’
4. ‘Foolish Love’

• Hans Gál, Four Partsongs for mixed voices (1966)

1. ‘To spring’
2. ‘Madrigal’
3. ‘Hymn to Diana’
4. ‘Invocation’