A set of four songs written for the composer Huw Watkins, and commissioned by Adrian Adlam for the Freden International Music Festival 2025.

The story behind this commission is an extraordinary one. Adrian was approached in Freden by a local man who owns a special violin, and had researched its history. It had once been owned by Alois Rosetz, a German musician who was concertmaster to Max Reinhardt in the 1920s-30s. Alois was married to a Latvian-Jewish pianist, Solomea Graudan, and when in the run-up to the second world war he refused to divorce her, he was blacklisted and they fled to Latvia.

This did not help, despite Alois finding work as a concertmaster there. The Gestapo would regularly arrest his wife Solomea, and only release her if he agreed not to play his solos at the Libau Opera House. Eventually, the Gestapo shot Solomea and beat Alois before sending him back to Berlin to stand trial. This he survived, but afterwards entered slave labour at an armaments factory. He was unable to retrieve any of his possessions, including the violin.

Towards the very end of the war, in 1945, Alois found himself caught up in a battle in a Berlin street, where a bullet tore through his lower right arm. It meant he would never be able to play the violin again. Even so, he managed to track down his violin, and kept it with him until he died in 1955 – the year it was bought for the current owner, who uncovered this terrible story.

The piece was performed for its world premiere in Freden, Germany, in 2025, with Adrian Adlam playing that very violin, accompanying the tenor James Gilchrist, who sang my words. It was a commission that came with a huge sense of responsibility, for both me and the composer Huw Watkins, and the performance was a very moving one; the beautiful little church in Freden was full of tears.

Future performances are planned in the UK.

“Played out in the Freden church beneath the life-sized angel – hanging ominously between the singer and violinist like a pasty-faced figure of judgement – the result was powerful and confronting… The theme in Stolen Songs of something that, against the odds, survives as living witness to a cruel history struck chords in every sense. And that the something – Alois Rosetz’s violin – was there onstage to tell the story of its one-time owner, like the singing bones of Zoe Gilbert’s text, was extraordinary: a physical connection between past and present that the text poetically describes. ‘Hands warm your bones now, warm in summer sun. You sing for us the memory of uncountable losses and one.’” – Michael White, BBC Music Magazine