For the past 20 years, Exilarte – Vienna's Centre for Banned Music – has worked tirelessly to research and preserve the lives and works of musicians and theatre artists who were denounced by the Nazi regime as "degenerate". To mark its anniversary, the Wiener Symphoniker, conducted by Katharina Wincor, will present a commemorative concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus on 23 September.

The anniversary concert pays tribute to two composers whose music has remained largely forgotten to this day: Wilhelm Grosz, born in Vienna in 1894, and Hans Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901, both of whom came from Jewish families.  

Wilhelm Grosz, a pupil of Franz Schreker, found himself at the heart of the vibrant cultural life of Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s, navigating between the avant-garde modernism of the Second Viennese School, Expressionism, the New Objectivity, and the emerging influence of jazz on popular music. Alongside his orchestral works Serenade, Op. 5, and Dance, Op. 7, both premiered in Vienna in 1921, the Wiener Symphoniker will perform the belated world premiere of his Spanish Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra, composed in exile in London in 1937. The soloist is Mitra Kotte. While living in London, Grosz even reached the top of the charts with one of his popular songs before emigrating to the United States in 1939, where he died at an early age.

Hans Winterberg, the only composer to survive the Nazi ghetto of Theresienstadt, was deeply influenced by the Czech musical tradition following Leoš Janáček. His works include compelling large-scale orchestral scores such as his Symphony No. 2, composed during the Second World War – a tragic epic marked by richly layered harmonies and orchestral colours, powerful dissonant outbursts and vibrant polyrhythmic energy. After the war, Winterberg settled in Bavaria, where he continued to compose, having felt increasingly alienated as a German-speaking musician in Czechoslovakia. Following his death in 1991, many autograph manuscripts from his estate remained inaccessible in a Sudeten German archive until 2015. Exilarte is now gradually bringing this remarkable legacy to light in collaboration with the publisher Boosey & Hawkes.

Tickets for the anniversary concert are available through the Vienna Konzerthaus - online or at the Ticket and Service Center.