St Cecilia’s Hall Lunchtime Series

Tuesday, 16 June 2026 | 1pm–2pm

St Cecilia's Hall, Niddry Street, Edinburgh

At the heart of this programme sits something truly extraordinary: the world premiere of a recently discovered string quartet by Pál Hermann. Born in Budapest in 1902, Hermann was a celebrated cellist and composer who performed across Europe until the Nazi occupation of France brought his career, and his life, to a violent end. Deported from the Drancy internment camp outside Paris in May 1944 on Convoy 73, he was executed in Kaunas, Lithuania. As the train stood at the station, he threw a note to his brother-in-law pleading for his precious cello to be saved. Only 22 of the 878 men on that convoy survived the war.

The manuscript of the String Quartet was preserved by the family of French organist Xavier Darasse, who sheltered Hermann during the war. It lay undiscovered at the Conservatoire de Toulouse until it was recently brought to light and shared with the Missing Voices initiative, a project dedicated to rediscovering the lost works of composers who perished in the Holocaust.

Before the performance, Dimitri Malignan, French pianist, curator, and founder of Missing Voices, will give a short pre-concert talk about Hermann's life, the discovery of the manuscript, and the significance of bringing this music back into the world.

The programme has been conceived as a coherent emotional journey: from Haydn's serene Emperor Quartet, through the world premiere of Hermann's quartet, to Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 6, whose final movement, marked La Malinconia, brings the concert to a close with characteristic complexity and shadow. It is a movement that holds grief and resilience in equal measure, and feels, on this occasion, like exactly the right place to end.

This concert has been supported by the Edinburgh Jewish Cultural Centre and the Edinburgh Liberal Jewish Community. All ticket holders are warmly invited to a post-concert reception from 2–3pm.