Music: String Quartet No. 1, Op. 21: II. Molto vivace
Composer: Paul Ben-Haim
Artist: Carmel Quartet
Album: Paul Ben-Haim: Chamber Music for Strings
Label: Toccata Classics TOCC 0214

Purchase: http://bit.ly/1k5hPth

The Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim (1897–1974) was born Paul Frankenburger and made his early career in his native Munich. Reading the danger signs earlier than most, he emigrated to Palestine in 1933 and soon became one of the leading figures in the musical culture of the emerging Jewish state. His music mirrors this change of circumstance: the early String Quintet (1919) taps a vein of rich late Romanticism influenced by Richard Strauss, but the rhapsodic First String Quartet (1937) is coloured by middle-Eastern melisma and folk-rhythms.

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Paul Ben-Haim: String Quartet No. 1, Op. 21: II. Molto vivace

Toccata Classics is a label dedicated to producing recordings of the huge amount of top-notch classical music that the concert halls and major record companies are ignoring.  We make a point of seeking out interesting composers from less familiar musical cultures and from all periods, in the Nordic and Baltic countries, in central and eastern Europe, Russia and further afield.

Toccata Classics was launched in 2005 to bring you these forgotten gems. We now have around 100 CDs in the catalogue with, in the pipeline, recordings of music by Alkan, Alnæs, Ashton, Adolf Busch, Enescu, Ernst, Farwell, von Hannenheim, Glanville-Hicks, Grigoriu, Kerem, Kornauth, León, Lyatoshynsky, David Matthews, Oppel, Buxton Orr, Peyko, Rameau, Ramey, Reicha, Röntgen, Sekles, Shebalin, Tartini, Matthew Taylor, Telemann, Vladigerov, Wagner, Weinberg, Woyrsch and many more.