Gál Choral Music Volume 3 – Toccata Classics

Hans Gál spent the second half of his long life — he died in 1987 at 97, which means he outlived nearly everyone who had known him in his prime — in Edinburgh, a city that suited his temperament perhaps more than Vienna ever did. Precise, somewhat reserved, committed to craft over spectacle. The music on this third Toccata Classics survey of his choral output reflects all of that. It also reflects something darker: the particular pressure that history exerted on a Jewish performer of his generation, and the way great composers absorb catastrophe and transmute it into form.

Start with the Nachtmusik of 1933.

The date alone is enough. Gál had just been removed from his directorship of the Mainz Conservatory — one of the early, efficient acts of the new regime — and the piece he wrote in response is not a howl but something more unsettling: a kind of controlled disquiet, the harmonic language circling without resolution, the flute offering what sounds like reassurance but keeps withdrawing it. Carolyn Sampson navigates this exquisitely. Her tone in the upper register is pure without being cold, and she understands — as some singers with more obviously “radiant” voices do not — that beauty here is precisely the thing being threatened. The instrumental combination of flute, cello, and piano alongside male chorus is unusual, and Gál uses it with the kind of economy that comes from a composer who has thought hard about what each instrument actually does, as opposed to what it conventionally suggests.

The two male-voice choruses of op. 8 come from 1914 — another year history did not leave unmarked — and they establish something important: Gál’s command of unaccompanied choral writing was essentially complete very early. “Sterne in Wasser,” with its quietly adventurous harmonic language, could almost be mistaken for a mature work. Almost. There’s a suppleness in the later pieces that is still becoming here, but the tone-painting is already confident and the voice-leading never merely smooth — it has direction.

Gál’s Edinburgh years are the subject of some of the most interesting repertoire on the disc. Once settled in Scotland, he did what he had done in Vienna and Mainz: he founded a small a cappella choir. But there was a new dimension now. He was living, as he saw it, in the land of the Elizabethan madrigalists, and he genuinely loved that tradition — not as a museological exercise but as a living example of how much wit and feeling could inhabit a relatively constrained form. The Four Part-Songs, op. 61, set to English texts, show a composer engaging with a foreign language not as an outsider trying to pass but as someone genuinely curious about what English vowels and stresses can do inside a polyphonic texture.

The Borealis Choir under Bridget Budge and Stephen Muir sings with clarity and commitment. Intonation is secure — no small thing in Gál, where the harmony can shift in ways that catch unprepared singers — and the blend across sections is well managed without being homogenized. The recorded sound from the Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall at Leeds is natural and unflattered, which is exactly right.

What makes Gál worth rediscovering — and this series has done real work in that direction — is not the pathos of his biography, though it is genuinely poignant. It’s that the music holds up. It does not ask you to make allowances. The craftsmanship is real, the emotional intelligence is real, and there are moments in this album where the combination of Sampson’s voice and Gál’s particular kind of austere lyricism produces something that stops you in your tracks. That’s the only test that finally matters. Strongly recommended.