Ebony Band releases final album with founder Werner Herbers

The Ebony Band, an ensemble formed of members of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to promote forgotten music from the first half of the 20th century, will this week release its final album. Due to the declining health of the group’s founder, oboist Werner Herbers, Achtung, Aufnahme!! will be released digitally this week before physical copies become available in July.

The album is a final wish of Herbers and has been completed by the Ebony team in just a few weeks. All tracks on the album are world premiere recordings of works written around 1930, which have rarely been heard live. As well as the title work Achtung, Aufnahme!! by Wilhelm Grosz, the album also features two ‘potpourri’s – a genre which saw composers combine themes or sections from existing musical works with incidental music – centred around Walter Goehr’s Komödien in Europa and Mátyás Seiber’s Die vertauschten Manuskripte.

Herbers (pictured above) received copies of the album last week and expressed his hope that the album will help the composers’ works ‘be rediscovered, recorded, performed and enjoyed. Just like the other 125 composers from the interwar period whose ‘lost’ works I have dug up and archived over the past 50 years. Now that I won’t be here for much longer, I am truly grateful to the Netherlands Music Institute in The Hague that they have taken on the responsibility to preserve my enormous archive and keep it accessible to all.’

As well as holding the role of principal oboist with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for 35 years, Herbers is also a conductor and researcher focusing on discovering, performing and recording works of ‘forgotten’ composers from the interwar period. For his achievements as a musician and researcher, he was awarded the Haarlem Hogenbijl Prize in 1997. The Ebony Band’s archive of information and music is a result of this lifelong devotion and spans the ensemble’s entire 32-year history.

©Bert Nienhuis

The archive will be transferred to the Netherlands Music Institute in The Hague, where Herbers’ legacy will be made accessible for musicians, musicologists and programmers. This donation also represents a continuation of Herbers’ legacy as an educator. As well as being a professor at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, Herbersworked as a coach at China’s Canton International Music Academy, the Pacific Music Festival in Japan, the Lindenbaum Festival in South Korea and Canada’s Banff Centre.