Fall Concert: What a Life!

The fall concert’s centerpiece is What a Life!, the Austrian-born composer Hans Gál’s musical parody about life in a British detention camp. Gál’s satiric revue What a Life! was written and performed for the entertainment of Gál’s fellow prisoners in the Isle of Man detention camp during the summer of 1940. After a rollicking entrance march, more serious numbers such as the “Ballad of the German Refugee” mingle with the irony-laced “Barbed Wire Song” (“Why are human beings behind a wire?” the lyrics inquire) and “Song of the Double Bed.” Tenor Ross Hauck and baritone Erich Parce will sing, with the songs interwoven with readings from Gáls’ eloquent camp diary by ACT Theater’s Kurt Beattie.

The program also includes Gál’s Huyton Suite, composed in the Huyton Camp, near Liverpool, where his internment began. Gál scored the work for flute and two violins because he had access to only those instruments. Rehearsals in the camp were interrupted first when two musicians were deported suddenly to Canada, and a second time when some were transferred to the Isle of Man.

Coventry: A Meditation for String Quartet by Vilem Tausky, another composer who emigrated to Great Britain, is a musical meditation on the horrors of war. A student of Leoš Janáček, Tausky fled to France after the rise of the Nazis and later volunteered for the Free Czech Army. After the fall of France he reached Great Britain, and as a member of the Czech Army in Exile he was called into Coventry the day after the cathedral was destroyed and helped to search the ruins for survivors. The courage of the people of Coventry in the blitz inspired him to write this haunting quartet. After the war, both Gál and Tausky remained in Great Britain and became leading figures in the country’s musical life.

Marcel Tyberg’s lushly romantic piano trio, composed in 1936, is another West Coast premiere and an introduction to a Viennese composer whose works have only recently been rescued from oblivion. Only one-sixteenth Jewish, Tyberg perished nonetheless in Auschwitz, but he had handed off his works—ranging from popular dance music to Mahlerian symphonies—to a friend, Milan Mihich. In 1945, Mihich and his family fled to Italy with Tyberg’s entire catalogue, which was in turn entrusted to his son, Enrico Mihich. Enrico later moved to Buffalo, NY, and spent decades trying to fund the creation of performance-ready scores from the fading, handwritten documents. With the help of the Foundation for Jewish Philanthropies and Buffalo Symphony Orchestra’s JoAnn Falletta beginning in 2005, Tyberg’s music can now be heard by a new generation.
 

Vilem Tausky
Coventry: A Meditation for String Quartet (1941)
Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Leonid Keylin, violin; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Mara Finkelstein, cello
 
Hans Gál
Huyton Suite, Op. 92 (1940)
Zart Dombourian-Eby, flute; Elisa Barston, violin; Mikhail Shmidt, violin
 
Marcel Tyberg
West Coast Premiere: Piano Trio (1936)
Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Walter Gray, cello; Craig Sheppard, piano
 
Hans Gál
West Coast Premiere: What a Life! (1940)
Kurt Beattie, actor
Ross Hauck, tenor; Erich Parce, baritone
Zart Dombourian-Eby, flute; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Leonid Keylin, violin; Susan Gulkis Assadi, viola; Mara Finkelstein, cello; Mina Miller, piano