Category: International-en

In 2026, the ACF London celebrates its 70th anniversary. Rather than celebrating the ACF itself, we want this to be an ACF – A Celebration of Friends, of anniversaries and birthdays of artists and scientists who make 28 Rutland Gate a vibrant hub for cultural and scientific exchange between Austria and the United Kingdom.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the exil.arte association and the 10th anniversary of the Exilarte Center of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw), we are honoured to announce a gala concert at Senate House, University of London, in cooperation with the Royal College of Music (RCM), and the Alumni Office of the mdw, Members of the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra and pianist David Hausknecht, will perform works by Austrian-born composers whose lives and careers were profoundly shaped by exile, displacement and new beginnings in the UK such as Hans Gál, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Joseph Horovitz.

The highlight of the evening will be a performance of Horovitz’s String Quartet No. 5 (1969). For this concert, the Royal College of Music has made available the original manuscript of the work from the Joseph Horovitz estate for research and performance purposes. The London performance will be followed by further iterations in Vienna, including as part of the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna’s chamber music series “Aus nächster Nähe” (“From a close distance”).

The concert concludes with Korngold’s Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 15, a masterpiece of early twentieth-century chamber music.

Welcome addresses will be given by Ulrike Sych, Rector of mdw, and Anita Taschler, Alumni Office of the mdw. Presentations by Michael Haas, co-founder of exil.arte and Director of the Exilarte Center of the mdw, and Peter Linnitt, Librarian of the Royal College of Music, will provide insights into the international collaboration dedicated to the research, preservation, and rediscovery of music in exile.

Thursday, 17th of September, 2026 at 6pm

Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

For further information & tickets please click here.

Performers:
Łucja Madziar, violin
Manon Stankovski-Samano, violin
Raphael Handschuh, viola
Katharina Steininger, cello
(Members of the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna)

David Hausknecht, piano

The concert will take place during the Exile Centre’s Triennial Conference at Senate House, University of London, and will be followed by a reception.

We are pleased to announce the book presentation of “Music of Exile – The Untold Story of Composers Who Fled Hitler” (Yale University Press, 2023) by the renowned author and researcher of “exiled music” Dr. Benjamin Michael Haas.The presentation will take place on 27 September at London’s Reform Club.
  
Wednesday, 27 September 2023, 6 pm
104 Pall Mall
St. James’s
London SW1Y 5EW
UK
 
Free Admission!

Presentation

Benjamin Michael Haas

Discussion:

Benjamin Michael Haas and James Jolly

About the Book:

What happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience?
 
In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler’s Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile—composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.

Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers produced music that synthesized old and new worlds, some becoming core portions of today’s repertoire, some relegated to the desk drawer. Encompassing the musicians interned as enemy aliens in the United Kingdom, the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the twentieth-century soundscape—and offers a moving record of the incalculable effects of war on culture.
 
About Autor:
Benjamin Michael Haas, PhD was for many years a recording producer with Decca and Sony. 1994/5 he was appointed Vice President of Sony Classical in NY. He has won a number of Grammys, initiated and led Decca’s recording series “Entartete Musik”. From 2002 – 2010, he worked as Music Curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. From 2000 – 2015 he was director at London University’s Jewish Music Institute and in 2015/16, he was a Research Associate at the University College London’s School of Jewish and Hebrew Studies. Since 2016 he has acted as Senior Researcher at mdw’s Exilarte Center, which he co-founded.