MUSIC IN EXILE - TORONTO-BASED ARC ENSEMBLE PERFORMS AT MERKIN HALL

Holocaust Music Lost & Found presents

ARC Ensemble, Music In Exile: New York

Saturday | November 15 2025 | 7:30 pm

Merkin Hall Ticket Link 

Erika Raum, violinMarie Bérard, violinSteven Dann, violaThomas Wiebe, cello, Joaquin Valdepeñas, clarinet, Kevin Ahfat, piano

FREDERICK BLOCK – Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 26

ARTHUR WILLNER  – Clarinet Sonata, Op. 107

JERZY FITELBERG – String Quartet No. 2

JERZY FITELBERG  – Serenade for Viola and Piano

FREDERICK BLOCK – Piano Quintet, Op. 19

If you are not familiar with the works of composers Frederick Block, Arthur Willner, or Jerzy Fitelberg, you are probably not alone. However, you can join Toronto's Arc Ensemble this Saturday as they showcase the music of these artists, who were marginalized under 20th-century repressive regimes.

Founded by the guitarist and musicologist Simon Wynberg in 2003, the ensemble’s core group is comprised of senior faculty from Toronto’s Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School. In performance and recording, it also attracts guest artists, including the late pianist Leon Fleisher, novelist Yann Martel, actors Saul Rubinek and R. H. Thompson, and composers R. Murray Schafer, Omar Daniel, and Vincent Ho.

Devoted to the chamber music of Mieczysław Weinberg (released in 2006), the ensemble began its Music in Exile series on record. First on the RCA label, then continuing on the Chandos label, their efforts garnered multiple honors, including three Grammy nominations. "Weinberg's oeuvre, of course, was already well renowned in the Soviet Union, but it took time until the West heard about him," says Wynberg. The ensemble's 2006 recording is among the initial efforts that helped put Weinberg's work into the internationally much-performed repertoire.

Renowned for his pioneering work in rediscovering twentieth-century repertoire, James Conlon, the Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera, also serves as the inspiration behind the ensemble's mission and as its Honorary Chairman.

Through recovery, research, recording, and performance, the ARC Ensemble is bringing the lost and forgotten voices of composers who were directly persecuted during the Nazi and Soviet regimes, as well as those whose lives and work were indirectly shaped by political suppression and emigration, back to life. “We are looking at this primarily from a musical and cultural loss point of view. There is, of course, the Jewish component, but also the Soviet one, of both Jewish and non-Jewish suppression during the Stalinist era,” says Wynberg, who is also the ensemble’s artistic director.

“We look to Italy and Spain, where under Franco and Mussolini, the cultural loss is presented by those who had to flee, whose lives and careers were interrupted, or ended. We started, after presenting a program with music of Terezin, with repertoire that was well presented,” explains Wynberg. “This repertoire was perhaps not widely played, but it was well researched and internationally available. We then moved on to examine works that were lost due to exclusion by the oppressors, and there was an enormous amount of repertoire left to be explored. Part of my job was to involve the conservatory ensemble in promoting the conservatory through a valuable mission, while adding to the performance repertoire,” he explains.

This means shedding light on the artistic work of those who fell victim to the cancel culture cult, brutally executed by those in power, and quickly infiltrating every layer of life.

Recovering the work of such a diverse range of artists, the ensemble has played a key role in the revival and performance of repertoire from completely different geographic and cultural regions, like Alberto Hemsi, a Sephardic Jew born in the Ottoman Empire who received his musical training in Italy; Dmitri Klebanov, a Ukrainian nationalist; and Walter Kaufmann, a renowned Indian classical music scholar who fled Nazi Germany for Mumbai.

Driven into exile, these artists became, to varying degrees, vehicles of new cultural immersions. According to Wynberg, the ensemble's artistic director, he recognizes in some examples of these varied works that “being forced to reinvent themselves as artists [at times] resulted in music of incredible depth and variety,” as he tells Classical Post’s Jonathan Eifert. 

“Many of the people who fled were themselves products of the great musical institutions at the time,” explains Wynberg. “They were broadly and well-trained as musicians, instrumentalists, conductors, and organizers, and they brought their talent along.”

The irony isn’t lost on Wynberg, who explains that it took a Canadian ensemble to recover the works of Block, Willner, and Fitelberg in the New York City Archives and bring them back to the NYC performance stage. The concert at Merkin Hall is presented by Holocaust Music Lost & Found.

Arthur Willner’s estate found its way to the Leo Baeck Institute via England. He was a Czech composer. The archives of Austrian Frederick Block, who emigrated from Vienna to London and then to New York, and those of Polish émigré Jerzy Fitelberg, are held at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts.

Wynberg scoured the special collection of manuscripts at the Lincoln Center Public Library in 2022, searching for lost scores, when Block’s name caught his eye. The archival work is involved, whether online, searching through an enormous amount of material to find the music and reviewing it, or in boxes. Both methods have their challenges, but Wynberg prefers the hands-on approach, once you are at the archive in person.

The up-and-coming Jewish composer, who had lived in Vienna, had written piano and string quartets, piano trios, six operas, and orchestral works before being forced to flee when the Nazis occupied Austria. A recording of Block’s works was released as part of the ensemble’s Music in Exile series in 2024 on the Chandos label. 

Chamber Works by Jerzy Fitelberg, released in 2015 on the Chandos label, was nominated for one of the ARC’s Grammy nominations in the "Best Chamber/Small Ensemble Performance" category. “This Polish artist never received the full attention he deserved,” claims Wynberg. “He died young, like Block. His work was suggested by one of his relatives during a concert in LA, and we recorded it. And with Wilmer, we are still in the process of exploring his work. He is renowned for his arrangement of Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, but his own works are still largely unknown – we hope to change this, over time. “