Sony Masterworks Releases Arc Ensemble's Third Recording Two Roads to Exile

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“The ARC Ensemble play with fierce conviction” ― Alex Ross

SONY MASTERWORKS announces the release of ARC Ensemble’s third recording, Two Roads to Exile. As part of its acclaimed “Music in Exile” series, Two Roads to Exile features repertoire by two brilliant but neglected composers, Adolf Busch and Walter Braunfels. Produced by multiple Grammy® award- winner David Frost, Two Roads to Exile comes on the heels of ARC Ensemble’s previous two Grammy®-nominated albums, On The Threshold of Hope (2006) and Right Through the Bone (2007). SONY MASTERWORKS releases Two Roads to Exile on Tuesday May 25, 2010. Adolf Busch and Walter Braunfels were major German musical figures in the 1920s and ‘30s, who were forced into two very different kinds of exile as their country moved toward institutionalized racial intolerance. Adolf Busch, praised by Hitler as “our German violinist” to differentiate him from his Jewish colleagues, was one of Europe's pre-eminent virtuosos. Busch felt both ashamed and embarrassed by the Nazis and in 1933 left Germany for Switzerland, and then moved to America just before the war. Walter Braunfels, half-Jewish, although a practicing Catholic, moved to Überlingen, a small town on the shore of Lake Constance, where he was hidden from the Nazis: an internal exile immobilized by his attachment to his homeland. ARC Ensemble’s “Music In Exile” series revives works that were lost or ignored due to the political upheavals and changes in musical fashion that followed WWII. “The status of composers during the 20th century has as much to do with politics, fashion and sheer luck, as it has to do with training, imagination and creativity,” says Simon Wynberg, Artistic Director of ARC Ensemble. "Through [ARC Ensemble’s] remarkable dedication to the music of these composers, along with the scholarship, discussion and historical context provided by this [Music in Exile] series, the stories of these composers are brilliantly illuminated,” says James Conlon, the Honorary Chairman of ARC Ensemble.

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