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Tal - Works for Viola

£12.69

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Label: C-AVI

Cat No: AVI8553144

Barcode: 4260085531448

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Release Date: 3rd August 2018

Works

Tal, Josef

Duo for viola and piano
Perspective for solo violo
Suite for solo violo
Viola Sonata

Artists

Hartmut Rohde (viola)
Christian Selbert (piano)

Works

Tal, Josef

Duo for viola and piano
Perspective for solo violo
Suite for solo violo
Viola Sonata

Artists

Hartmut Rohde (viola)
Christian Selbert (piano)

About

Josef Tal was an Israeli composer and a student of Paul Hindemith. His oeuvre of more than 100 works is not well known and the viola works mostly unrecorded. Hartmut Rohde, a Professor at the Royal Academy in London, performs these viola works with accompanist Christian Selbert.

“When the Berlin Academy of the Arts asked if I would agree to participate in a recital along with Josef Tal and learn his two works for viola and piano under his guidance, I was thrilled. At the Berlin University of the Arts I knowingly and willingly place myself in the tradition of the most influential musicians of the 1920s: for me as a violist, Paul Hindemith, Tal’s teacher, is always present as one of our greatest composition teachers. In 1995 we organized a large-scale international Hindemith Festival, during which almost all of Hindemith’s compositions featuring the viola were performed.

“This made me want to become better acquainted with works by Hindemith’s pupils and his entourage. Tal was one of Hindemith’s most well-known students, and one of those who most consistently took the master’s ideas a step further. He also became a committed, fascinating trailblazer in the field of electronic music (in which Hindemith had already started experimenting in the late 1920s at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, the forerunner of our University of the Arts). Josef Tal initiated the Centre for Electronic Music in Israel in 1961 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; at that time, he was one of the country’s leading, most well-known composers.

“I met Josef Tal when he was 94 years old. Our encounter was like a journey into an unsettling past, marked by a great number of hardships and upheavals he had personally endured. It also offered a revealing glimpse into the outlook of composers in Israel, as well as previously in Germany – even into compositional approaches from many eras he did not live through himself.

“Throughout our collaboration, Josef Tal proved to be a great thinker: not just an analyst, but also an interpreter who consistently sought to bring out the emotional aspect in music. He ascribed a decisive role to that which lies ‘between the notes’. I like to call such an approach Durchhören, i.e. ‘hearing through the music’. It can open many marvellous avenues for the performer, particularly in music which does not seem emotional or Romantic at first glance.”

– Hartmut Rohde