Robert Kahn Chamber Ensemble

Late Romantic chamber music and songs with unique instrumentations

by persecuted and forgotten Jewish composers

Photo: Bette Bayer

Anker 1

musicians

Kyoko Tanino, violin

(Japan) Concertmaster of the Bodensee Philharmonic Orchestra Konstanz , Circolo Quartet

John Wennberg, cello

(USA) Solo cellist with the Bodensee Philharmonie Konstanz , Circolo Quartet

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Stefan Wagner, Horn

(Germany) Deputy Solo Horn Player with the Bodensee Philharmonic Orchestra Konstanz

Anna Gann, soprano

(Germany) Gernsheim Duo , 3klangspiel

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Naoko Christ-Kato, Piano

(Japan) Gernsheim Duo , 3klangspiel

www.christ-kato.com

Anker 2

Composers

Robert Kahn (1865-1951) was the son of a respected Mannheim merchant and banking family. He studied in Berlin and Munich. He worked as a répétiteur at the Leipzig Opera and at the Royal Academy of Music in Berlin, where he was appointed professor in 1904. Kahn's works were performed with great success well into the 1930s. In 1934, already an emeritus professor, he was stripped of his membership in the Academy of Arts, whose senate he had belonged to since 1917, due to the Nazi "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service." Against this backdrop, he was forced to emigrate to England in 1938. He spent the rest of his life in England.

Rosy Wertheim (1888-1949) grew up as the daughter of a highly respected Amsterdam family; her father was a banker, her mother a musician and artist, and her grandfather a prominent Dutch politician and philanthropist. She was one of the first Dutch female composers to achieve international success. She studied composition in Amsterdam, Paris, and Vienna, spent six years in Paris, and forged close friendships with composers such as Messiaen, Jolivet, and Ibert. Her studies and concerts subsequently took her to the United States. In 1937, she returned to Amsterdam as a successful composer. In 1943, she fled persecution by the German occupiers and survived in hiding in Laren. She died of cancer in Laren in 1949.

Vally Weigl (1894–1982) was an Austrian-American composer and music therapist from Vienna. She studied musicology, psychology, philosophy, and music education at the University of Vienna and took composition lessons with Karl Weigl, whom she later married. The annexation of Austria forced her to flee, and in 1938, she emigrated to the United States with her husband and son. While Karl Weigl, who died in 1949, was unable to replicate his success as a composer and teacher in Vienna, Vally Weigl began composing. She worked as a music and language teacher and as a translator in New York and Pennsylvania. After her husband's death, she suffered a shoulder injury that forced her to give up playing the piano. She began studying music therapy at Teacher's College, Columbia University, graduating in 1953, and worked as a music therapist in hospitals.

Pál Hermann (1902–1944) was a Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer from Budapest. He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music under Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. He lived in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris. After the German occupation of northern France, he fled to Vichy France, where he was hidden in a farmhouse. Finding it difficult to cope with the loneliness of his hidden life on the farm, he occasionally went to Toulouse to teach and maintain social contacts. During one such visit, he was arrested in a street raid and sent to the Drancy internment camp in the spring of 1944. On May 15, 1944, he was deported with the 73rd Convoy to the German-occupied Baltic states. Hermann has not been seen since.

Henriëtte Bosmans (1895–1952) was a Dutch composer and pianist from Amsterdam. Her father, Henri Bosmans, was principal cellist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. From early childhood, she received piano lessons from her mother, Sara, and at the age of 17, she graduated with honors as a piano virtuoso. She had already begun composing by this time, and her first work was published when she was 19. In 1920–1921, she furthered her compositional skills, including taking a theory course with Arnold Schoenberg. As the daughter of a Jewish mother, Bosmans, classified as "half-Jewish," was banned from performing and working from May 1940 onward. This ban affected all artists who could not prove membership in the Nazi Reich Chamber of Culture. Consequently, she could only perform clandestinely in the following years. Through internal exile, Bosmans survived the occupation without imprisonment.

Anker 3