Carmel Quartet - Ben-Haim: String Quintet in E Minor - String Quartet No. 1, Op. 21 (2014)

The Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984) 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.

Carmel Quartet, string quartet
Shuli Waterman, viola