Departure into a foreign land

His String Quartet op. 21 was composed four years after he fled the Nazi regime in his new home of Palestine.

Ben-Haim's music is characterised by the fact that it is rooted in the German Romantic tradition, is stylistically oriented towards French Impressionism, but also unmistakably incorporates influences from Jewish song culture.


The programme also includes the first string quartet by the German-American composer Ursula Mamlok, who died in Berlin in 2016. As a Jew, Mamlok left her hometown of Berlin in 1939 and emigrated to the USA with the intermediate state of Ecuador, where she trained as a composer. Mamlok's modernist individual style forms a constructive contrast to Ben-Haim's Mediterranean tonal language.

The concert will open with Antonín Dvořák's American Quartet. This milestone in the quartet literature was composed during the Bohemian composer's two-and-a-half-year stay in the USA, which was always characterised by ambivalent feelings, with inspiration from the size, dynamism and nature of the unknown country mingling with a longing for Bohemia.


The concert is part of the exhibition ‘Inside & Outside - Art, Music and Literature in Exile’ at Galerie Amalienpark.

• Sunday, 6 April 2025, 11 a.m., Schönhausen Palace
  
• Concert matinee ‘Departure into the foreign world’
  
• with works by Antonín Dvořák, Ursula Mamlok and Paul Ben-Haim
  
• Arminio String Quartet
  
• Admission 12 euros