Whether in his original home of Vienna, as a conservatoire director in Germany, or as an émigré in Edinburgh, where he became one of the mainstays of musical life, Hans Gál (1890–1987) championed choral singing as a way of directly involving people in making music: he founded and conducted a number of choirs and provided an extensive output of choral compositions. This first volume in a long-term project to record his choral music presents a rich variety of works for a cappella voices, ranging from demanding eight-part choruses to charming folksong settings.

This second album of Gál’s choral music offers a vivid cross-section of his music for chamber choir, featuring mixed voices, women’s voices and male-voice choir, both a cappella and with piano, and ranging across four decades. Whether in his original home of Vienna, as a conservatoire director in Germany, or as an émigré in Edinburgh, where he became one of the mainstays of musical life, Hans Gál (1890–1987) championed choral singing as a way of directly involving people in making music: he founded and conducted a number of choirs and provided an extensive output of choral compositions.

Like many Austrian Jews, Robert Fürstenthal (1920–2016) fled to the USA after the German invasion of his country in 1938. Music then became a link to his homeland: ‘When I compose, I am back in Vienna’. As an amateur composer, Fürstenthal preferred to work on a small scale, and his output of songs and chamber music is considerable. But he also wrote two sizable works for chamber choir, the first of which, in this series of two albums, is bookended by piano sonatas – all three works revealing that the tradition of Schubert and Brahms was alive in the California sun.