Timber of Those Times

Istvan Anhalt was a leading figure in avant-garde composition during the second half of the 20th Century in Canada. Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Budapest in 1919, he emigrated to France in 1946, then settled in Canada in 1949. The present recording of Anhalt's last two orchestral works, launched on the occasion of the centennial of the composer's birth, marks the beginning of an ongoing project by the conductor Ajtony Csaba to create professional commercial recordings of recent Canadian orchestral repertoire. Anhalt's stature as "the heavyweight among Canadian composers" (as Udo Kasemets wrote in 1975), the high quality of his mature compositions, and a significant and growing body of scholarly work on his music, all suggest that he will retain his place as an important voice in Canadian composition of his era.