Telling Power

MALCOLM MILLER attends the final concert in
a series devoted to music by banned composers

The final concert of an impressive Music in Exile concert and lecture series at London's Cadogan Hall (12-13 April 2008) given by the Artists of The Royal Conservatory, Toronto, directed by Simon Wynberg, was entitled 'Through Roses', on account of the moving music theatre work which formed the second half. The first half was devoted to works by composers forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and whose works were suppressed under the Entarte Musik banner and are still, remarkably, little known. The concert series formed an adjunct to the five-day international conference on Music, Oppression and Exile held on 7-11 April 2008 at the Institute of Musicological Research and the Jewish Music Institute, SOAS.

The programme opened with the UK première of Three Songs for Mezzo Soprano and String Quartet by Karl Weigl (1881-1949). Weigl, a successful composer in 1920s and 30s Vienna, was one of those composers who flourished until the Nazi regime made his career difficult and then impossible: in 1938 he emigrated to New York, where again he faced some uncertainties in his professional career, though he returned to composing after his fraught and fallow Viennese period.

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