The Chandos label's Music in Exile series takes note of the centrality of exile in the lives of musicians of the 20th century. Paul Ben-Haim, born Paul Frankenburger in Germany, certainly fills the bill, having fled Nazi rule in 1933 and settled in what was then British Palestine. He later became a major figure in the Israeli classical music scene, and his music gradually took on a more Jewish or generally Middle Eastern character. The first piece on this program, the Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 4, was written while Ben ...
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The Chandos label's Music in Exile series takes note of the centrality of exile in the lives of musicians of the 20th century. Paul Ben-Haim, born Paul Frankenburger in Germany, certainly fills the bill, having fled Nazi rule in 1933 and settled in what was then British Palestine. He later became a major figure in the Israeli classical music scene, and his music gradually took on a more Jewish or generally Middle Eastern character. The first piece on this program, the Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 4, was written while Ben-Haim was still in Germany and had no thought of leaving, shows no traces of this process and is probably the strongest work on the program. It is a chamber work in the idiom of Richard Strauss, with broad heroic themes almost immediately dissolving into extreme chromatic complications. It's a stirring youthful work with which chamber groups would do well to familiarize themselves. The rest of the program shows Ben-Haim struggling to merge this German language in which he was educated...
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