Joachim Mendelson: En hommage

With the homage to Joachim Mendelson, eda records continues its survey of Poland’s rich musical heritage of the first half of the twentieth century, a heritage that – as a result of the devastating consequences of the expulsion and extermination of the European Jews after 1933, the destruction of Polish musical life following the occupation of Poland in September 1939, and the policy of suppression during the communist era – was obliterated from music-historical consciousness. The monographic series en hommage appears as a supplement to eda records’ meanwhile six-part Poland Abroad series with first recordings of works by important Polish composers who almost all shared the fate of persecution and exile. Joachim Mendelson was born in Warsaw in 1892, and studied composition in his hometown and in Berlin. Like nearly all Polish composers of his generation, he went to Paris in the 1920s, where he joined the Association des Jeunes Musiciens Polonais, in which Poland’s entire musical elit