The ARC Ensemble, dedicated to recovering lost music, recently performed the works of Frederick Block, an Austrian Jewish composer forced to flee Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. Block's music, which hadn't been heard publicly in nearly a century, was discovered by ARC's artistic director, Simon Wynberg, in the archives of the New York Public Library.
For the last 20 years, members of ARC Ensemble have dedicated themselves to recovering the forgotten works of exiled composer s. Recently, the ensemble revived the works of Frederick Block — music that hasn't been performed publicly in nearly a century. For two decades, the ARC Ensemble (Artists of The Royal Conservatory) has recovered the forgotten music of exiled composer s. ARC recently performed the music of composers Walter Braunfels and Frederick Block .
Block’s works have not been heard for more than 70 years. In the fall of 2022, Simon Wynberg, the artistic director of Toronto's celebrated ARC Ensemble — Artists of the Royal Conservatory of Music — scoured the special collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts searching for musical scores lost to time and circumstance. 'I had never heard of him,' Wynberg recalled. He was referring to Frederick Block, an up-and-coming Austrian Jewish composer in Vienna during the 1920s and '30s. But in March 1938, when the Nazis occupied Austria, Block was forced to flee. Wynberg, who has spent 20 years as a music archaeologist, digging through archives to recover the works of forgotten composers, stumbled upon Block's scores. 'You had these composers who were extraordinarily well-trained,' said Wynberg, 'very, very talented, and whose careers were simply cut short through no fault of their own.' Kurt Weill, Hans Gál and Arnold Schoenberg were just a few of the most well-known composers forced to run for their lives in the face of the Nazi onslaught. However, there were many other lesser-known composers who were lucky to find safe havens, but never regained the stature and success they enjoyed in their home countries. 'This is music that springs from a deep need to demonstrate birthright, along with the necessity to accommodate new and complex situations and the bewilderment of learning strange new languages,' writes Michael Haas in his recently published book, Before the Nazis came to power, Jews had participated in every sphere of German and Austrian music life — as performers, conductors, composers, arrangers, publishers, teachers and musicologists. As soon as the Nazis took over, they purged the German and Austrian music and cultural scene — along with every other sphere — of all Jewish influence. Jews and the music created by Jews, were banned. 'To write authentic music,' said Wynberg, 'you had to be a German, qualified as an Aryan. It didn't matter what it sounded like, just the fact that it had been written by a Jew classified it as degenerate.' Block wrote music for orchestra and particularly for opera in the 1930s, for which he wrote his own libretti. Wynberg took photographs of some of the scores and returned to Toronto where he presented his most recent discoveries to the ensemble, which is made up of senior faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Music's Glenn Gould School. 'Everybody was impressed.' The ARC Ensemble recently featured three of Block's works — a string quartet, a piano quintet, and a suite for clarinet and piano — at a 20th anniversary performance at Toronto's Mazzoleni Concert Hall. According to Wynberg, it was the first time in nearly a century that Block's pieces were performed in public. The group also performed a string quintet by the noted German composer Walter Braunfels (1882-1954). Another anniversary concert is scheduled at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, Ont. Almost none of Block's music scores were published. The jury is still out when the musicians first rehearse a new work, said ARC cellist Tom Wiebe. 'There can be some combination of curiosity and maybe some puzzlement or even some skepticism.' 'Part of me is just saying, let's give this composer a chance. This is somebody who gave it their all and was a very skilled composer who really felt they had something to say. And so just for humane reasons, you want to give somebody a good look. You don't want to just discard the idea of playing their music because you haven't heard of them.' Therein lies the raison d'être of ARC: to expand the canon beyond composers like Bach and Beethoven — to make room for those we've never heard of.
Music ARC Ensemble Forgotten Composers Frederick Block Nazi Germany Vienna Toronto Classical Music Exiled Composer
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