Featured works

Music from the Internment Camp Revue:

• Douglas, Isle of Man, 1940
• Instrumentation: 2 Violins, Viola, Cello, Clarinet, Flute, Piano,
• 2 Singers: medium high and low voice

Includes songs and instrumental numbers from the bilingual revue, the melodrama Ballade vom Armen Jakob by Norbert Elias and the Suite from What a Life! for piano.

Written at Mooragh internment camp in Ramsey, Isle of Man in 1940

Instrumentation: Violin 1/2, Viola, Cello, Double Bass,

4-part male choir or ensemble: Tenor 1/2, Bass 1/2

Duration: 6 min

Read more about Peter Gellhorn’s legacy here.

Peter Gellhorn’s String Quartet No. 1 was written in Berlin in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. The work is full of emotional and textural contrast and reflects the upheavals of this difficult time for the composer.

The String Quartet No. 2 stems from the time immediately before and shortly after Gellhorn’s emigration to Britain in 1935. This bold and arresting work with a more positive feel is a significant contribution to the repertoire.

Read more about Peter Gellhorn’s legacy here. 

These two works for violin and piano were written for two fellow émigré performers Max Rostal and Maria Lidka during Gellhorn’s first years in Britain, while he was director of music at Toynbee Hall in East London.

Duration: Capriccio - 2.40 min, Intermezzo - 5 min

Read more about Peter Gellhorn's legacy here.

Dated April 1932, this attractive compositions was written when Gellhorn was 20, in the year he received the Gold Medal of the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin for his achievements.

Duration: 14 mins

This sonata was written for John Tobin and Tilly Connely, a well known piano duo in London in the 1930s. John Tobin was also Director of Music at Toynbee Hall, where Peter Gellhorn worked as a ‘resident volunteer’ from 1935 to 1939.

Duration: 15 min

Autumn (text by Walter de la Mare) is a moving song about loss, closely connected to Gellhorn’s experience of leaving loved ones behind when he emigrated to Britain.
Duration: 2.40 min, for medium voice

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (text by Yeats) was written for the composer’s daughter Barbara in 1995.
Duration: 1.30 min, for high voice

Ah, Par Quel, a setting of a short text by Racine (1639-1699), is the only vocal duet written by Peter Gellhorn. It was written in Woodbury (near Exeter in Devon) in November 1939 and is dedicated to Nigel Abercrombie, a distinguished academic and writer, whose wife Elizabeth was a singer at Glyndebourne before the Second World War.
Duration: 3 min, for soprano, mezzo-soprano and piano

Engel Lund’s Book of Folk Songs, published in two parts by Oxford University Press in the 1930s, presents folk songs in 14 different languages (with English translations), with beautifully crafted piano accompaniments by Ferdinand Rauter. Rauter gave hundreds of performances of these songs with the polyglot Danish/Icelandic singer Engel Lund all over Europe and the United States in the 1930s.

The songs from both collections were recorded by native speakers (including many international students at the RCM) at the RCM Studios, with pianists James Southall and Ouri Bronchti. The resulting double CD, produced by RCM professor Norbert Meyn, is available from Nimbus Records and at the RCM Box Office.

Written in 1917, these songs are settings of poems by the expressionist poet Ernst Stadler (1883-1914) who studied in Oxford in the early years of the 20th century and died in the First World War.

This edition was prepared in 2020 in collaboration with Dr. Hannes Heher of the Egon Wellesz Fonds in Vienna and makes the songs available for the first time.

Duration: 7 min