ARC Ensemble performs Frederick Block’s Piano Quintet

The ARC Ensemble performs the second movement of Frederick Block’s Piano Quintet, op.19. The work features on the group’s eighth ‘Music in Exile’ recordings for Chandos, The Chamber Works by Frederick Block, which looks at the works and legacy of the composer, left largely unexplored since his death in 1945.

The performance features Erika Raum and Marie Bérard on violins, Steven Dann on viola, Thomas Wiebe on cello and Kevin Ahfat on piano. It was performed live in Mazzoleni Concert Hall at The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Canada on 29 November 2023, as part of the ARC Ensemble’s 20th anniversary celebration.

Frederick Block was born in 1899 and his Jewish identity made him an immediate target when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. After waiting a year in London for visas, Block and his wife Ina arrived in New York in the summer of 1940.

In New York, Block found work scoring and arranging for radio orchestras, as well as arranging orchestral works for solo piano versions. During this time he also produced a large amount of chamber music. However, Block was haunted by premonitions of his death, brought on by the trauma of leaving his home of Vienna, as well as the death of his mother Berta, who was murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942. Block died in 1945 of stomach cancer, and scarcely left his apartment in the final years of his life.

’Of the many exiles we have investigated, Block’s story is among the most affecting, its poignancy deepened by the isolation of his final years, and the near total anonymity that followed his death,’ said the ARC Ensemble’s artistic director Simon Wynberg.

Wynberg found Block’s name in an online survey of the New York Performing Arts Library’s Special Collections. Once he realised all of the composer’s manuscripts survived, Wynberg ordered scans of Block’s music to share with the ARC Ensemble.

Nominated for multiple Grammy, JUNO and Opus Klassik Awards, the ARC Ensemble aims to right sins of omission, unearthing 20th century music by composers suppressed or marginalised as a result of policatl and racial discrimination.

The Chamber Works by Frederick Block is released on Chandos on 25 October 2024. Find out more here.

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