ARC Ensemble preserve the work of Alberto Hemsi

Toronto’s ARC (Artists of The Royal Conservatory) Ensemble has today released its sixth Chandos recording focusing on the music of composer Alberto Hemsi. The Grammy Award-nominated group are championing the research and recovery of works suppressed under repressive regimes in the 20th century.

In a continuation of it’s ‘Music in Exile’ series, the group chose Hemsi because of his own work as one of the first composers to collect music from the Sephardi Jews of the former Ottoman empire in an effort to save the music from extinction.

ARC Ensemble’s artistic director, Simon Wynberg, said: ‘Hemsi’s music is sui generis, very different from what anyone else was doing at the time. Hemsi worked outside the European mainstream, using fairly simple Sephardic melodies as the building blocks for extended and sometimes quite complex concert works.’  

Born in 1898 in Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now Turkey, to Italian parents in 1913, Hemsi received a scholarship from Musical Israelite Society of Izmir to study at the Royal Music Conservatory of Milan. In 1928, he was appointed musical director of the Middle-East’s largest synagogue, the Eliahou Hanabi Temple in Alexandria, but was forced in 1957 to flee Egypt for Paris where he conducted two Sephardi synagogues for 18 years before dying of lung cancer in 1975.

Hemis’ scores have been available since 2004, when his widow left the composer’s archive to the Institut Européen de Musique Juives in Paris, but Chamber Works by Alberto Hemsi, which is available from today, is the first commercial release devoted to Hemsi’s own works inspired by the music he saved.

The album also features violinists Marie Bérard, Erika Raum, and Emily Kruspe, violists Steven Dann and Julien Altmann, cellist Tom Wiebe, and pianist Kevin Ahfat.