Winterberg: Chamber Music, Vol. 2

The life of the Prague-born composer Hans Winterberg (1901–91) reads like the outline of a detective novel. Having survived internment in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto as a Czech Jew, after the War he settled in Munich as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but after his death his estate disappeared into the vaults of a research institute and was placed under embargo, emerging only in 2015, since when recordings and performances have revealed him as one of the major Czech voices of the twentieth century. This first recording of three of his four string quartets – their language downstream from Janácek and Schoenberg, with folk-music roots refracted through mid-century Czech modernism – confirm Winterberg’s standing, and underline his importance as a lone survivor of the group of young Czech composers whose infinite promise was extinguished in the Holocaust.