Waghalter’s “New World Suite” Receives World Premiere With Filharmonia Poznańska

Ignatz Waghalter’s New World Suite received its world premiere performance on May 17, 2019. The Israeli-born conductor Ariel Zuckermann led the Filharmonia Poznańska in Poznań, Poland. The concert also featured the Concerto for Piano by Karol Rathaus (1895-1954). The soloist was the Canadian-born pianist, Daniel Wnukowski. The performance was broadcast by Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

Both works, though vastly different in structure and mood, were composed in 1939, shortly after Waghalter and Rathaus had escaped from Nazi persecution in Europe and arrived in the United States.

Waghalter originally composed the ten movement suite for the American Negro Orchestra, which he founded in 1938. But orchestra was dissolved, as a consequence of insurmountable political and financial pressures, before Waghalter’s Suite could be performed.

It was not until 2014, sixty-five years after the composer’s death, that the composition was found among his papers by the British conductor Alexander Walker, who prepared a performance score from Waghalter’s handwritten orchestral partitur. Walker recorded the Suite, which was released by Naxos in 2015.

The concert opened with the complex and technically demanding Rathaus concerto, which was performed by Daniel Wnukowski with a fine combination of virtuosity and intellectual depth.

Waghalter’s New World Suite was the second and concluding work on the program. The Suite is distinguished not only by the melodic inventiveness that is characteristic of the composer’s work, but also by an irrepressible optimism.

The audience responded enthusiastically. At the conclusion of the Suite, Maestro Zuckermann was recalled repeatedly to the podium by the audience. He satisfied its demands by repeating the final movement of the Suite.