The ultimate refugee composer
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Don’t try to pin an adjective to Gerhard: he transcends them all. The son of a Swiss-German father and an Alsatian mother, born in Spanish Catalonia, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, organised the 1936 seminal modernist festival in Barcelona and left a couple of years later to spend the rest of his life in English exile. None of these nationalities was his…
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A very underrated composer who deserves to be played much more often. His Piano Concerto is truly a masterpiece, showing the influence of Schoenberg and Bartok. I also enjoy his Concerto for Orchestra.
Here they are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IffBqrtuGu0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJAbdEvfqx4
20C anxiety brilliantly conveyed.