Ideas - ARC Ensemble: The Forgotten Music of Exiled Composers

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

For the last 20 years, members of ARC Ensemble have dedicated themselves to recovering the forgotten works of exiled composers. Recently, the ensemble revived the works of Frederick Block — music that hasn't been performed publicly in nearly a century. *This episode originally aired on Dec. 19, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Ayed.

Often when we're playing music that's forgotten music, I will forget about its forgottenness. In the heat of the moment, we're just dealing with music that we want to play really well. You just can't wait to see what they're going to come up with. It's all about what's next on my stand. I can't wait to see. I can't wait to see what this new person is all about. I think it is an act of tikkun olam, repairing the world, as the Hebrew saying goes. Simon Weinberg is artistic director of the Ark Ensemble, the artists of the Royal Conservatory of Music, an ensemble that for more than two decades has dedicated itself

to reviving the lost and forgotten works of unknown exiled composers. It's a question of fair play. You had these composers who were extraordinarily well-trained, very, very talented, and whose careers were simply cut short through no fault of their own. Cut short because they and their music were labeled by the Nazis as degenerate

by virtue of their Jewish origin. Kurt Weill, Hans Gall, Arnold Schoenberg were just a few of the best-known composers forced to run for their lives in the face of the Nazi onslaught. But there were many others, lesser known, lucky to have found safe havens willing to take them. Most, however, never regained the stature and success they had enjoyed in their home countries.

Elisa Siegel's documentary is called The Test of Now. Our ultimate aim was the revival and the restitution of works that had been sidelined because of political repression, either from Nazi Germany or Soviet Union, but repressive regimes who had marginalized composers by having them exiled. My name is Simon Weinberg. I'm the artistic director of the Ark Ensemble, the artists of the Royal Conservatory. In the fall of 2022, Simon Weinberg was scouring the special collections list

at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. He stumbled upon the name Frederick Bloch. And I thought, I've never heard of him. I wonder who he was. And I discovered that he'd been a fairly noticeable figure in Vienna during the 1920s and 30s. As soon as I saw the list of his works, piano quintet, string quartets, piano trios, six operas, orchestral works, and I thought, well, this guy was really busy.

So I went through his material, and I thought, wow, this looks really, really promising. I took some photographs of scores and went back to Toronto and we put together a couple of reading sessions and everybody was impressed. This is really good stuff. What was the spark for you that made you say yes this time block? Well, the spark is when you hear the music played. That's when you decide.

And I don't make the decision. I mean, if I think something is fabulous, but the ensemble thinks it's second rate, we don't do it. We need buy-in from everybody. To see something come across your stand, it becomes something like, you know, opening a box on Christmas morning.

There's that feeling of what's going to be inside. What's the third movement going to be like, you know? Is it going to have a beautiful, am I going to cry in the slow, you know, you just can't wait to see what they're going to come up with. My name is Erica Rahm. Erica Rahm is a violinist with the Ark Ensemble. She has been with the ensemble since it began in 2003.

We have two violinists, and we are comprised of a string quartet, piano, and clarinet. It's all about what's next on my stand. I can't wait to see. I can't wait to see what this new person is all about. this new person is all about. Tell you what, you know what? You know what we can do is we can warm the beginning. If you go into the, yeah, and then go into the, that'll save us a little bit of speed. They're like little cadenzas, aren't they?

When we start working on a piece, there can be some combination of curiosity and maybe some puzzlement or even some skepticism. And part of the process is being won over through the understanding that we acquire of the piece. Tom Viba is cellist with ARC. He joined the ensemble in 2017. The process of being won over by the music of Block, we just had our first full day of rehearsal. That process is still taking place.

You can't force it. See, there's one. Why am I doing a dim? It's just so hard to make that work. You have to live with it. You have to dwell on it. You have to be open-minded. And then you have to see where that discovery takes you in your view of the music you're playing.

Tell me more about what it was that you saw in the archives that made you stop and think, this is worthy. First of all, these scores are incredibly beautifully written. His hand is just lovely, and all the scores are written like this, very careful. So these are finished scores. But what also struck me was that I could see that he was someone who was extraordinarily competent harmonically. He can move anywhere he wants at any time. He has this extraordinary facility with ideas and construction

and harmonic music. It just, you know, it kind of jumps off the page. And then I read about him and what other people say about their colleagues is always very instructive. Friedrich Bloch's friend

Otto Janovitz provides a convincing summary of Bloch's allegiances. It reads, who didn't belong to any school or movement, who didn't want to prove anything by his composing, who was not abstract or romantic, but who, with untiring industry, finished work after work, not concerned about criticism, success, unfortunately not even about performances, just following, honestly, his urge to create.

Frederick Blanc was born in 1899 in Vienna to Jewish parents. His father, Sigmund, ran a wholesale business that supplied flour and feed to local farmers, and he seemed to have a very successful business indeed. His mother, Berta, was a homemaker. And when Frederick showed signs of interest in music, his father typically said, absolutely no way. I don't mind if you play the piano for your own entertainment, but there's absolutely no way you're doing this as a career. Around about the age of 17, but there's absolutely no way you're doing this as a career.

Around about the age of 17, Blunt was corralled into the Austrian army to fight in the First World War. And he came back from the Italian front, and his father was so relieved that he'd survived without a scratch that he said, go ahead, my boy, whatever you like. Do music, it's fine with me. And so Blunt, with his father's blessing, studied with some very eminent composition teachers. And then when his father died

in 1926, he left the business to Frederick. But Frederick wasn't involved in any way in running the business. He was just the owner of the business. And during that time, he was able to dedicate himself completely to composition. And then in 1936, the opera Samum was performed in Pressburg, which is now Bratislava, by the National Orchestra. And it received wide reviews, great enthusiasm. It was a real success. But he had two years in which to build on that success until the occupation of Austria in March 1938. And of course, as soon as the Nazis came to power, there was an immediate freeze on Jewish involvement in music,

and Jews were involved in every aspect of music making, whether it was publishing, composing, performing, presenting, arranging, dance bands, you name it, broadcasting. There were Jews in every section of the German musical experience, but they were a soft target in the sense that removing them didn't actually stop the machine from working. The degeneracy of the music had very little to do with how it was constructed or what it said. It was more to do with who had written it. And Jews being un-German were by

definition incapable, as the Nazis saw it, of original thought. And therefore it was degenerate and unacceptable because it wasn't authentic. To write authentic music, you had to be a German, qualified as an Aryan. It didn't matter what it sounded like. Just the fact that it had been written by a Jew classified it as degenerate. Bloch's music was widely performed in Vienna during the 1920s and early 30s. But when the Nazi forces arrived in 1938. Blanc found himself with very little time to prepare for his exit. The inheritance were now

irrelevant. All the money that he had was taken away from him. He managed to ship out his piano and some personal goods, but that was about it. And he went to Trieste, where he managed to get a British visa. And then he managed to find his way to London, where his fiancée was waiting for him. And they stayed there until they got permission to get to the United States. And they arrived in New York in 1940. And this is where the story really takes an incredibly sad turn. is where the story really takes an incredibly sad turn. When he got to America and New York, there were quite a few broadcasts of his works, but very, very few performances. I've only found two or three records of public performances of his works. And there were maybe half a dozen broadcasts of various lengths. So in a sense, I mean, the actual public performance of his works,

it's been nearly a hundred years now. Kind of folding that rhythm to the whole idea of those two bars. Da-da-da-da-dee-da-da-da-da-dee-da-dee-da. When you practice block, to what extent do you sit there and think, of course this deserves to be performed? The jury is still out when we start looking at it. And part of me is just saying, let's give this composer a chance. This is somebody who gave it their all and was a very skilled composer who really felt they had something to say. And so just for humane reasons, you want to give somebody a good look. You don't

want to just discard the idea of playing their music because you haven't heard of them. Whenever you have them, basically. That's right. Not an angel. Block is a new one for us. So there's, you know, it's a work in progress. You know, we had our first date. Now we're hanging out. I can see what I like.

I can see where his insecurities are. I can see the things I better not mention to him. I can see there his insecurities are. I can see the things I better not mention to him. I can see there's hidden treasures now, you know, like just qualities that I didn't know he had. I mean, it's an unfolding relationship. So I think when we have that writ going into the a tempo on page 27, it's, you know, it's probably just a molto espressivo moment. So he has his second little, you know, rhetorical moment. He goes on, you know. Even when we might be warming to a composer,

personally, it doesn't hit me right over the head. The idea, oh yes, this is a brilliant composer. We've got to perform this person's music. For me anyways, it doesn't quite work that way because they have their own language that is foreign to me. And it just takes me a while to start to understand that language so the process of falling in love with the composer's music when i haven't heard of them before, at least the music we play with Ark is usually a more gradual process because I have to learn that language. Good. You just say, I'm named. At what stage does that actually happen for you? I'm just going to... At what stage does that actually happen for you?

It happens when we've gone beyond the logistics of, okay, who plays what, when, and those sort of roadmap issues, and when it goes into something deeper and that might only happen as a performance draws near Often when we're playing music that's forgotten music, I will forget about its forgottenness. In the heat of the moment, we're just dealing with music that we want to play really well. But then sometimes when I step back and think about the decades it's been lying there unplayed, well, there's something very special about that. I'm not necessarily comparing it to Hemingway, but how would somebody else feel if they were looking at A Farewell to Arms as a manuscript, and it had never been published. There'd be some sort of extra dimension to the power of that moment. And it's different than playing music that nobody's

heard before that's just been written. That has its own specialness to it, and it's its own privilege premiering a piece that's just been written. But there is an added dimension to playing unheard music that was written a long time ago. It's part of what a serious classical musician who loves what they do should be thinking, and that is do your best with the score in front of you. Just looking back a little bit with some of the joints like going into two. I wonder if that might just start a little bit more reluctantly coming out of the time we take. Right. And then the stringendo once again maybe it takes a little bit of time to get rolling.

Four before? Yeah. What do you wrestle with? What are you wrestling with as you practice block? Personally, I wrestle with how to make sense of the score. When something's not making sense yet, or if it's not working, and we've been doing just what the score says, what does that mean? Does it mean there's something in the instructions of the score that we're missing or that we're not reading between the lines in the score the right way?

Or does it mean that the composer's instructions maybe weren't spot on? Here it is again. Like, she and I are playing pianissimo, which is great. And you guys are already so, with all these mezzo and everything I think he wants just piena voce piano plays It doesn't mean that

there's something that we need to alter about the composer's instructions to make it really compelling. When it comes to Bloch's exile, this is a man who was strongly connected to Vienna. He felt very much part of the social fabric and the musical fabric. And when he came to New York, in as much as he managed to find work for himself, doing arrangements for music publishers, I don't think he ever felt at home. So I think for him, ever felt at home. So I think for him, that huge break from one culture to another really affected him.

Bloch immediately started to get these premonitions of his own death. And there was no reason, physiologically. He wasn't ill. He didn't suffer from a chronic condition. But he was convinced that he was going to be taken. And as a reaction to these persistent threats, he started to compose like a wild thing. He did not stop writing. I think he was, by that stage,

emotionally and spiritually quite sick. A friend described that he lived the life of a houseplant, hardly left his apartment, and really was devoted simply to producing as much music as he could. I mean, I think his powers of composition kept him afloat, in a way. I mean, that was his defence, that he was able to compose in the face of all this difficulty

and this foreignness. And for the next five years, he turned out orchestral works, chamber music, vocal pieces, piano music, as well as a huge amount of arrangements that he did for music publishers in New York solely to make money. I love nothing more than to play something nobody else has played. First of all, you don't worry about suffering by comparison. So you can relax about that.

But I don't know, I love learning it from scratch. No rules. I get to decide the rules. And it is kind of fascinating to hear the second recording of something after you've recorded it. Or, you know, just some of the conservatory kids will play it, and you go, oh, nuts. Like, why didn't I think of that? Like, that's brilliant. Or somebody doesn't take a tempo you took after you've recorded it and you think, wait, what? You didn't like my tempo? But no, I think it's fantastic fantastic it just primes the pump

it's simultaneously a feeling of responsibility but huge freedom huge freedom too and just like you feel like a kid in a playground there's nobody else here it's all yours go for it In what way has it changed the way you think about music?

When I'm playing or teaching or studying standard repertoire, it's very easy to fall back into thinking about or playing or teaching that music the way it's always been done because there's such a body of performances and recordings of that repertoire so you can't help but be influenced one way or another and in a way that has that might not have anything to do with the composer's original intentions but when we're playing this music and there are no recordings

there is no canon or way to do it it's just you and the. It's just you and the score. It's just you and the primary source. And there is something liberating about that. You know that you're not affected by some other performance of it. And it's also an honor to be the performers who first perform it or the first performers to play it in a long time or the first performers to record it. It's an honor and it's also liberating because the shackles of convention aren't there. After the war, many of these exiled composers were seen as retrogressive and backward. Their music harkened back to an earlier time. They had been writing music that was very traditional,

part of that German tradition in which they'd been schooled and trained. And post-war, there was this feeling that that music had to be replaced. It had to have some kind of relationship to a new age, a post-war age where all this awful stuff had happened. There was a move to serial composition. The mission was to turn out composers who wrote for the machine age. There was no room for the kind of romanticism and the melodic works that had been written in the past.

And there was a reaction to that. works that had been written in the past. And there was a reaction to that. And that reaction meant that these traditionalist composers were marginalized and seen as irrelevant, really. But now you look at the picture sort of 80 years on, and you have a completely different perspective because there's no axe to grind. We are looking at these works as works that may have been 30 years out of date at the time they were written, but now who cares? Bach was seen as being fairly old-fashioned as well. Does that bother us now? Not at all. So 80 years on, the music speaks for itself and we can assess it on its own terms. The last years of his life were incredibly prolific. In those last four or five years of his life,

in addition to settling into a foreign city and a new apartment with his wife and getting used to a completely new environment, he produced an extraordinary amount of music. Symphonic works, his opera Esther, which was never performed, vocal works, piano compositions, chamber music, over 35 opus numbers, in addition to over 70 works that he transcribed from orchestral scores to piano.

It is absolutely extraordinary. What is it like for you to practice block? I love physically playing his music. I mean, it just soars and he writes beautifully for the violin. He really knows how to utilize the instruments so that you really shine and you sound like a million bucks. Violin is a lyrical instrument and so he's giving me lots of opportunities to sing. He's giving me opportunities to sing in my best range, in my best register, but also lots of character, lots of other kinds of variety. You want opportunities to show the different sides of the instrument and

the different sides of your own character. But, you know, a great piece, I think, takes us through all the different people that the violin can be. And in this case, in a purely technical sense, it's not awkward writing. It feels good under the fingers. It's accessible. He doesn't write, he writes in a violinistic way. But there are plenty of great composers where it's like chopping wood trying to, like the piece is great, but it doesn't feel good to play. So when I'm playing Block, I feel like I'm at my best. I feel like he's showing all my good angles.

You're listening to the documentary, The Test of Now on Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus.

Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. For the past two decades, the members of Toronto's ARC Ensemble, the artists of the Royal Conservatory of Music, have devoted themselves to reviving the lost and forgotten music of exiled composers,

most of whom were forced to flee the Nazis. composers, most of whom were forced to flee the Nazis. The list of composers that the ensemble has recorded over the last 15 to 20 years includes Mieczysław Weinberg, Adolf Busch, Walter Kaufman, Dmitri Klebanov, Röntgen, Robert Müller-Hartmann, Friedrich Bloch. Friedrich Bloch, a noted Viennese Jewish composer who fled Nazi-invaded Austria in 1938.

His works had not been performed in public for nearly a century, until now. Bloch is among the latest composers whose works have been recovered by ARC's founder and artistic director, Simon Weinberg. by ARC's founder and artistic director, Simon Weinberg. In late 1944, he developed a chronic cough. In early 1945, he was diagnosed with cancer, and by June, he was dead. Friedrich Bloch died on June 1, 1945,

and his wife Annie pasted a clipping of his obituary into the Block scrapbook. It reads, After a long, painful illness, my beloved husband, Frederick Block, formerly of Vienna, passed into eternity at the age of 45, at the height of his powers. That's a short life, although not unusual for exiles. For exile composers, there are a number who managed to reach 50, but not much more. Several, I mean, the most famous is Kurt Weill who died when he was 50. Other exiles that we've done, Joji Fittelberg died, I think he was 51. So it was not uncommon, but 45, that's too young. The whole question about this is, you know, why?

Why did he have these premonitions? What's behind it? One's initial impulse is to suggest that there was something mentally wrong, that he was delusional. But in fact, I think the solution is far more prosaic. He had left his mother behind in Vienna, and he knew, he must have known just from seeing the Nazis at work before he left, that there was very little chance that she would survive. She was taken from Vienna to Prague to the Terezin camp, and then from Terezin, she was on a transport with 1,700 elderly Jews taken to Treblinka, Treblinka being an extermination camp. And it's clear to me that that is behind the guilt and the premonitions and dying two months shy of his 46th birthday. There are times when their life story seems to have some relevance. Oftentimes, though, we're playing music that was written

before the drama. You know, it was from their heyday and when they were enjoying career success. For instance, Szymon Laks, here was somebody he did not manage to get out in time and who was in the concentration camps. Szymon Lachs, the Polish-Jewish composer and the last conductor of the orchestra at Auschwitz. He survived. When Lachs was on the train to Auschwitz, the train stopped, and he managed to work his way

to a slit between the slats of the train, and he could look out, and there was a sliver of light there, and he saw the name of the station that they'd stopped, and it was Eisenach, which of course was Bach's birthplace. And he'd always wanted to pay homage to the master and visit Eisenach, and yet the opportunity that had been afforded to him was to see it on his way to Auschwitz. Something remarkable happened in relation to Szymon Lachs at one of the ensemble's performances. in relation to Szymon Lachs at one of the ensemble's performances. The ensemble played the Lachs Quintet on popular Polish themes in Warsaw about 15 years ago,

and after the performance, which was incredibly well received, our pianist was approached by a very elegant, charming woman who told her that she was so pleased to hear the piece because she hadn't heard this work in many, many decades, and that she remembers her husband playing it. And it turned out that the woman was Spielmann's wife of pianist fame. Spielmann's wife of pianist fame. Władysław Spielmann, the Polish-Jewish pianist and composer whose life story inspired the Oscar-winning film The Pianist.

The Spielmanns had known the Lacks family when they lived in Paris. Paris. Over the last 20 years, Simon Weinberg and the Arc Ensemble have recovered the lost music of some two dozen forgotten composers and hundreds of unknown works, works that are now regaining their rightful place in the repertoire. I just see it as being essentially unfair that you've got people who really can write, who are incredibly well-trained, who had to undergo a horrible dislocation moving from familiarity to where the hell am I? I think it's extraordinarily unfair that people with that kind of talent

and that sort of training are pushed aside, which is exactly, of course, what the Nazis wanted to do. So I also think of it as kind of avoiding this kind of continuance of Nazi philosophy because the Nazis had always wanted Jews out of the cultural realm. Europe by the National Socialist Party. I think by continuing to ignore them, you're really fulfilling all the Nazis' hopes and expectations that they would be forgotten. Simon, why were Bloch and his compositions forgotten? Bloch's works were forgotten largely because they were never published. Very, very few of his own works were published. A lot of his arrangements, in fact, all his arrangements that he made in New York, you can track them down, but none of his original works were actually published. For that, it's difficult to fathom. I think in the early 30s, he switched to composing opera,

and he was focused on that. And the publication of opera is not something that happens with the same kind of ease and fluidity that accompanies publication of chamber music or solo piano music. It's a really complicated process. I think he was also not particularly interested in making a huge career for himself. He wanted to compose. He hoped, and his wife certainly hoped, after his death that his works would be remembered and played. But he wasn't a career composer in the sense that he wanted to make his mark on the musical world. He wanted to produce what was inside of him and make it available.

But he was not interested in pursuing all the mercantile opportunities that involve getting things into print and dealing with publishers. He really wasn't driven by that. He was not a self-promoter. The long version is obviously has to do with not only this question of fairness, but a question of how people are judged by history. And there's this kind of circular argument which says, well, if such and such isn't well known, there must be a good reason for that. And often there is a good reason for that. But in this case, there isn't really a good reason. There's a cause, but there's no musical or artistic reason for these composers to be unknown now.

To what extent do you believe Locke's works stand the test of time? The short answer is yes. It's great music. It's substantial. There's lots for us to sink our teeth into. I have no doubt they stand the test of time. It really is a question of a lot of this music. Does it get integrated into the repertoire? Or does it stay somewhat apart? I think once it's recorded, it has a chance of being embraced. Without a live performance or a recording, it has absolutely no chance.

So we're putting our foot on the first rung of the ladder and hoping that other people will take it up further. It's a whole ecosystem. No great composer exists in a vacuum. If Bloch is not Prokofiev, that's okay. We need many voices as part of a rich, diverse ecosystem. And then occasionally you have these giants that come out. Is Bloch one of those giants? I don't know.

You know, you have to wait. You have to wait and see. And again, you have to give him a chance. You have to give people a chance to become familiar with his language. But even if he's not, he's a major contributor to the musical world, the musical community, the musical ecosystem. community, the musical ecosystem. Why does the test of time have to be the test for greatness? Because for somebody's work or composition to stand the test of time until now. And who knows how well it will be known after we've performed and recorded this. It might be forgotten again, but that doesn't mean that it's not great music. So I'd rather think about the test of now than the test of time

when it comes to the music that we perform. Simon, was there a moment in the archives that stopped you in your tracks one of the most moving moments was when i read of his wife annie's attempts to disseminate and promote his music and obviously not being a musician there's a kind of mixture of of desperation and a kind of musical ignorance of how the world works that leads her to do things which are really testament to her love for her husband. But at the same time, it didn't really do anything for the promotion of his music. Music without players, performers, scores by themselves are really no more than musical effigies. You really need those intermediaries to reveal the music.

For Simon, reviving the music of forgotten composers is not about honoring victims. Oh no, not at all. I mean, I think it is an act of tikkun olam, repairing the world, as the Hebrew saying goes. But it's not restoring the balance in the sense that you are honoring someone who was killed and reviving their works as a kind of beneficence and a kind of responsibility that you have.

I don't see any responsibility. If someone died tragically and they happened to write terrible music, that does not qualify them for rehabilitation. The music was terrible no matter how they died. If they'd lived to 103 and had a natural death, as opposed to dying in Auschwitz but still wrote rubbish, it's, you know, the one thing doesn't cancel out the other. And I think a lot of remembrance falls foul of these things, where people confuse remembrance with the obligation that we have to present stuff of quality. Thankfully, I mean, there's a huge amount of quality works. But we've kind of avoided the Holocaust repertoire of the Terezin composers,

for example, the people who lost their lives in the Holocaust and who happen to be composers, mainly because a lot of them have really been well covered. There's an extraordinary irony in that the composers who survived and were exiled have been marginalized. And those that lost their lives in the course of the Holocaust have been revived, but they've only been revived in the context of memorialization and the Holocaust. And they've become known as Holocaust composers, something I don't think any of them really would have had much sympathy with. They would want their works on regular programs,

because a lot of the works have nothing to do with memorialization at all. They're great pieces of music that deserve a life in a regular program. And the fact that they were written in Terezin or in a situation where the composers were under extreme duress, that shouldn't be part of the narrative. The narrative is the music itself. And I think remembrance for people who have been completely, is what we want to concentrate on. Once the interpreter hat goes on, I'm trying to approach this with the same commitment,

respect that I would Beethoven or any of the constellation of our deities. And then there'll be a moment where you think, oh man. And it's easy to forget that it's not that many generations. It's not that many degrees of separation from that person. And that I am living that connection that's being passed not by many hands, really. And although we don't know these composers, this is not a huge community. We are connected with them. If you're going to play Bach, you have to collaborate with Bach. So right now we're collaborating with Block.

We're collaborating. We're going to put together a show with Block. This is going to be our joint project. And he sent us his instructions. We got them. We know how to read them. And now we're going to take it from there. We're going to keep our fingers crossed. We hope he likes what we're going to do with it. There's going to be some misunderstandings and a great composer lets it go. I think they let that interpreter have at it and add their two cents, and a great interpreter is as faithful as they possibly can be. So it's a two-way street, and it doesn't matter that the composer's dead. We can still have this relationship.

He's sending us his instructions as clearly as he can. We are reading them as clearly as we can. And in that way, we are colleagues. I think presenters in North America certainly, and I think you can level the same accusation at European presenters in some ways, is that you have this core group of works which is shrinking year on year, and they're recycled by presenters and by artists.

And for me, I think one of the most exciting things of going to a concert is the journey of the unknown. Hearing something that you have no idea where it's going and you keep up with the music or you try and keep up with the music, maybe the second time you keep up with it a little better, but there's a journey involved and you have no idea of the destination whereas a core work you are traveling with the music you're aware of it you're familiar with it and what you're really doing is comparing where the music is is going and how it's going to what you've heard before. So there's this kind of comparison of expectation and experience.

And that simply doesn't work with a new piece because it's a continual unfolding of the unknown. And for me, especially with works that are unfamiliar, it's that unfolding that I find the most exciting thing about what we do. It's like walking into a room where you have a whole lot of valuable stuff and you have to pick the shiny object that most appeals to you and that people haven't had a look at yet. It really is a question of laziness.

I have to accuse my contemporaries of extraordinary laziness when it comes to repertoire, because it is just a wealth of stuff that deserves resuscitation. I mean, I often say that this music is hiding in plain sight. You just have to open a couple of doors and there it is. And there's a huge amount of satisfaction in hearing a work of real quality that no one else has heard for 80 or 100 years. No one else has heard for 80, 100 years. But the real satisfaction is when other ensembles start to pick up on the work that we've done. I keep coming back to this idea of,

no, this is not the end of that story. That's not allowed to be the end of that story. That's not allowed to be the end of that story. This is not some severed, faraway place. You know, this is our immediate history. It's not always going to be possible to right the wrongs of history. We can right this one. They get to win the last round. That documentary, The Test of Now, was produced by Aliza Siegel. Special thanks to the members of the ARC ensemble, Marie Berard, Steve Dan, Erica Rahm, Tom Viba,

Joaquin Valdepenas, and Kevin Afat, and to ARC's Artistic Director, Simon Weinberg, and to General Manager manager Jessica Wright. Thanks also to Michael Haas, author of Music of Exile, published by Yale University Press, and to Doug Docter and Catherine Duncan of CBC Music for the recording of the ARC Ensemble's 20th anniversary performance. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.