15th June, 1pm, St. Cecelia’s Hall
The leader of the Edinburgh Quartet, “Scotland’s string quartet: writes to us:
On 16 June at St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh, we will give the world premiere of a string quartet by Pál Hermann (1902–1944), a Hungarian-Jewish composer and cellist murdered in the Holocaust. The manuscript was recently discovered in the Médiathèque of the Conservatoire de Toulouse, where it had lain completely undiscovered since being donated by the family of Xavier Darasse, the Toulouse organist who sheltered Hermann during the Nazi occupation.
On 15 May 1944, Hermann was deported on Convoy 73 – the only convoy from the Drancy internment camp sent to the Baltic states, carrying 878 men to Kaunas in Lithuania and Tallinn in Estonia. As the train stood at the station, Hermann threw a note to his brother-in-law pleading for his prescious instruments to be saved. “We are still full of hope,” he wrote. Only 22 men from that convoy survived the war.
The premiere is paired with Haydn’s String Quartet in C major ‘Emperor’ and Beethoven’s String Quartet in B flat major, Op. 18 No. 6, whose extraordinary final movement, La Malinconia, feels like exactly the right ending for a concert honouring a composer stolen from us too soon.
French pianist and curator Dimitri Malignan, founder of the Missing Voices initiative – dedicated to rediscovering the music of Jewish composers killed in the Shoah – will speak about Hermann’s life and legacy before the concert.
Interested parties can book their tickets here for £13-16.
