The cpo label now completes its edition of the concertos of Kurt Atterberg with the Cello Concerto and the Horn Concerto, both written in the 1920s when Atterberg was already a very experienced musician known throughout Europe and active at home and abroad. More intuitive than analytical as a composer, one may understand the ‘movements’ of the Cello Concerto as representatives of ‘normal’ sonata form in which the motifs are reconfigured and then taken up again, whereas the Horn Concerto, despite its unusual but purposeful employment of forces, adheres to traditional form.

Shortly after the Nazis had seized power, Paul Frankenburger, like many other Jewish composers, left Germany for Palestine, which was then under British administration. In Palestine he resumed his creative work with Ben-Haim as his Hebrew name. He became one of the pioneers of classical music in Israel, both as a composer and as an admired composition teacher. His Concerto Grosso, his first work for symphony orchestra, is embedded in the spiritual and technical sound world of German late romanticism and French impressionism and related to the Baroque concerto grosso only insofar as it contains numerous solos and homogeneous orchestral segments. Ben-Haim concluded the score of his Symphony No. 2, his longest orchestral work, in October 1945. This work adheres to the four-movement structure of classical and romantic music. The autographic score has an epigraph by the Israeli poet Shin Shalom: "Awake with the morning, O my soul, on the summit of Carmel over the sea." It indicates the hopeful, optimistic mood prevailing throughout most of the symphony. The conductor Israel Yinon (who unfortunately died in 2015) is once again our skillful guide through this second Ben-Haim production.