Hans Gal was born near Vienna in 1890, the son of a Jewish doctor, and grew up in the world of that turn-of-the-century imperial capital. He was fortunate enough to study with some of the foremost teachers of the time: the pianist Richard Robert, whose pupils included Rudolf Serkin, George Szell and Clara Haskil; the musicologist Guido Adler; and, for composition, Eusebius Mandyczewski, a close friend of Brahms who became something of a spiritual father to Gal. In 1915 he won the Austrian State Prize for Composition.
The Mainz years became the busiest period of his life — until the National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933 brought instant dismissal and a ban on all publication and performance of his works in Germany. Gal returned to Vienna, but the situation in Austria grew ever more threatening, and immediately after Hitler marched in in March 1938 he fled with his family to England, intending to go on to America. A chance meeting with Donald Francis Tovey brought him to Edinburgh, where the family settled at the outbreak of war. Whitsun 1940 brought the next blow: internment as an “enemy alien”; only in 1945 did he obtain an appointment as lecturer in music at Edinburgh University.
His output comprises four operas, four symphonies, large-scale cantatas and a great many chamber, piano and vocal works; by the end of his long life he had left some 140 published works. Although more than half of them were composed in Britain, his work — like his whole cultural identity — remained deeply rooted in the Austro-German tradition: in the clarity, wit and formal mastery of the Viennese classics, in romantic intensity combined with emotional restraint, in a Schubertian love of melody integrated with a polyphony that came from a lifelong engagement with Bach, and in the harmonic complexity and advanced tonality of pre-serial modernism. Gal never doubted the continuing validity of tonality; at the same time his music is immensely complex and subtle in its motivic structure and its piquant harmony, which veers aside at every turn.
The Sonata for Violin and Piano Op. 17 was written in 1920 for the virtuoso Robert Pollak and belongs clearly to Gal’s most outwardly expressive phase, the period of his operas and large-scale works, when his music enjoyed its widest recognition. Although a sonata, the work reflects in many ways the scale of those compositions: “operatic” in the grandeur and generosity of its design, with melody-shaping parallel progressions that for moments allow distant key relationships to show through.
Gal’s cello works span more than sixty years: they begin with the Suite for cello and piano of 1919 and close with a solo sonata and a solo suite of 1982, when the composer was ninety-two; the principal works are the Cello Concerto completed in 1944, a Concertino for cello and string orchestra of 1966 and the Sonata Op. 89 of 1954. By the time he wrote it Gal had been in Britain for sixteen years, yet it would be hard to detect anything English in the style — there are even remarkable structural parallels between the two sonatas. He saw the creative process not as the expression of immediate experience but as a distillation: it is anchored in a deep layer of consciousness which the experiences of the moment do not reach — the same thing, he said, as with rainwater that must seep through before it comes out again as a spring. Though primarily a pianist, Gal also played the cello for a time. The recording was made in May 2001 in the Clapp Recital Hall in Iowa City.