Help us complete the cycle...

With generous support and huge institutional investment over the past three years, Orchestra of the Swan has been able to record the first three of four volume’s of the marvellous symphonies by Robert Schumann and Holocaust survivor Hans Gal. We need your help to complete this historic journey of rediscovery and reassessment. 

UPDATE: 3 August- Donors over £100 will receive a credit as a project sponsor in the CD booklet. Larger donors can also have logos, website address or other sponsorship identifiers included in the booklet. Donors £1000 and over can have their branding added to the outside back cover of the CD. If you want to talk about how sponsorship can bring maximum impact for your company or foundation, email the team.

UPDATE: 2nd August, 2013: Friends from America, Canada, Europe and Asia, please don't be scared off by those pound signs next to all the numbers on the right. You can help, too. Indiegogo is a truly international platform- anyone can donate and it's equally easy wherever you live. Your credit card company or PayPal will do the currency conversion for you at the best possible rate. 

Viennese-born composer Hans Gál (1890-1987) was one of the leading voices of a generation of composers whose talents flourished in the early decades of the 20^th century, only to see their legacies nearly lost in the events unfolding from the Holocaust and World War II.

In the 1920’s, Gál was one of the most popular and respected composers in the German-speaking world- with three of his operas in production in major opera companies across Germany and Austria. However in 1933, Gál was one of the first composers of Jewish descent to see his music completely banned by the Nazi’s. He  became unemployable and had to escape with his family to the United Kingdom, and after a difficult period in British internment camps, he became a professor at Edinburgh University, where he enjoyed a long and distinguished career as an academic.

“structural genius… contrapuntal mastery…committed performance…splendid sound, warmly recommended.”

Gramophone

However, Gál’s music never regained its pre-1933 popularity, and over the decades, performances and commissions became ever scarcer. In spite of this, Gál continued to compose prolifically into his 90’s, and his output now stands as an important and unique contribution to 20^th c. music. Gál wrote music of profound melodic beauty, sophisticated contrapuntal ingenuity and distinctive harmonic originality. He is now considered one of the most important composers whose lives were altered irrevocably by the events of the Holocaust.

In 2010, the Stratford-upon-Avon based Orchestra of the Swan embarked on an ambitious four-year plan to return four Gál's symphonies to the concert stage for the first time. The aim was not only to make the first complete set of recordings of these works, but to give concert audiences their first chance to hear them live in 30-70 years. As a way of contextualizing this unknown repertoire, the decision was made to pair Gáls four symphonies with those of Robert Schumann (1810-1856), a composer Gál admired and wrote about.

The project began with a performance of Gál’s Symphony no. 3  in December or 2010- the first professional performance of the work since 1955. A recording followed and the series quickly established itself as one of the most critcally acclaimed and influential classical recording projects of our time.

This project has already done a great deal to bring Gál’s music to the attention of music lovers and critics around the world- millions of listeners have encountered his music for the first time thanks to broadcasts of our concerts and CDs across the USA, UK and Canada, and the project has been covered extensively in the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times and other leading media outlets

Robert Schumann was one of the most original and innovative composers of the 19^th c. , but in recent decades, modern performance trends had led some to question his mastery of orchestration and symphonic form. Woods and the Orchestra of the Swan set out to record Schumann’s symphonies using orchestral forces and seating plans like those used in Schumann’s own orchestras in Leipzig and Dusseldorf, performing from the latest Urtext editions and playing with a scrupulous attention to Schumanns metronome markings and the performance traditions of his time.  The results have been called “revelatory” by the Indianapolis Star and MusicWeb International.

“Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ Symphony is given a superb outing, gloriously joyous in the outer movements, exuberant without being pushed, and also generously lyrical when needed, not least in the triptych of middle movements, beautifully phrased and sounded, breathing and shapely, sensitively addressed and lovingly detailed…As for alternative recordings of the ‘Rhenish’, Woods holds his own against such wonders as Sawallisch (Dresden rather than Philadelphia), Celibidache (Munich), Giulini (Chicago) and immediately becomes a favourite for this delectable work.”

Classical Source

In December 2013, the orchestra plan to complete this historic project with Schumann and Gál’s First Symphonies. Gál’s First was composed in 1927, and in spite of huge early success, it has only been performed twice since the end of World War II, in Germany in 1952 and most recently by the BBC Scottish Symphony in 1970, forty-three years ago.

“Gál’s own Third Symphony is a real discovery: confident, rich music in the late romantic idiom that has bags of soul and the residue of a genuine expressive thirst… Gál is truly worth rediscovering; Woods’s recording project for Avie has intrigued and delighted me and I’m only left wanting more.” 

Classic FM Magazine

However, in this very tight economic climate, the orchestra urgently needs your help to find funding to cover the costs of the musicians and recording sessions to complete this cycle.

The orchestra’s administration and Board, conductor Kenneth Woods and Avie Records are all working tirelessly to secure this much needed funding for this iconic final volume. We are all committed to finishing this historic project, and have already secured over seventy-five percent of the funding needed to complete volume four, but we need this campaign to be a success.

 “The Austrian-born composer Hans Gal has been way off the radar screen until just recently. His Symphony No. 3 languished unplayed for 55 years. Like so many European composers, Gal had to flee the Nazis, eventually landing in Scotland. So hats off to conductor Kenneth Woods and his Orchestra of the Swan who have been making a case for Gal’s elegantly built orchestral pieces which look back fondly to the German romantic era of Schumann, Brahms and Richard Strauss. Here’s hoping this is the beginning of a substantial Gal revival.”

All Things Considered, National Public Radio

WFMT Chicago “Best Classical Recordings of 2011″

Gramophone Choice, May 2012

Top Ten Recordings of 2011, Iowa Public Radio