Nico Muhly, Hans Krasa's Brundibar, Hans Gal - Music Behind Barbed Wire

According to New York Magazine the composer Nico Muhly is “known to some as Philip Glass’s protégée, to others as the guy who helps make Björk and Rufus Wainwright sound better, and to most as one of the next great hopes for the future of classical music.’ Muhly talks to Tom Service about his dislike of “genres” and pigeon-holing of musicians, the three principles his new works must have and the musicians and composers of the future.                         
More information: Nico Muhly

The composer Hans Krasa died in Auschwitz in 1944. The previous year his children’s opera Brundibar had been performed in the Czech concentration camp Terezin fifty-five times and was even filmed by the Nazis for propaganda - an extract of which can be heard in this programme. Tom visits rehearsals for a new production of Brundibar which is about to open at the Southbank Centre before touring the UK and talks to Ela Weissberger (now 84 and living in New York) who sang the role of the Cat in the performances in Terezin – one of the last remaining members of the original cast.

More information: Brundibar in London, Workington, Watford and Norfolk

The Austrian-born composer Hans Gal was one of many Jewish refugees who fled to Britain from Hitler’s Third Reich only to find themselves interned as “enemy aliens”. Gal spent five months over the summer of 1940 in internment camps and kept a diary during this captivity – a vivid account of personal survival and creativity. This diary has just been translated into English and published for the first time. Tom talks to Gal’s daughter Eva Fox-Gal who worked on the translation and to the writer and record producer Michael Haas about the composer’s life and music in Austria and the UK.

More information: Hans Gal - Music Behind Barbed Wire