The diaspora of Jewish composers from Hitler’s Reich was wider and deeper than just to the USA (eg Korngold, Schoenberg, Toch) or Britain (Gál, Goldschmidt and Wellesz, for example). The three composers featured on Leon Botstein’s strongly played new album went elsewhere: Josef Tal (1910-2008) to Jerusalem, Marcel Rubin (1905 95) to Mexico City via Paris and Walter Kaufmann (1907 84) to what is now Mumbai, in which havens they composed these three works.

Tal is the best known and most modernist in outlook, though Exodus (1946 47) is not especially radical in idiom. Its tense atmosphere perhaps reflects the political instability ahead of Israel’s independence the next year (indeed, the premiere in December 1947 was impacted by the unrest, and the baritone soloist had to be replaced by a speaker, necessitating some last-minute recasting of the vocal lines to the orchestra). A symphonic poem in five sections, the work follows the Israelites’ servitude in Egypt, escape and ‘The Passage of the Red Sea’ (with the briefest of codas lamenting the pursuing Egyptian dead), to the celebratory final ‘Miriam’s Dance’. A colourful, approachable work, Exodus – which started life as a ballet – is not Tal’s finest work and eventually found its final form in 1958 as an electronic score.

Kaufmann’s attractive Indian Symphony dates from 1943 with the Second World War in full spate, not that one would know from the music. More travelogue (‘An Austrian in Bombay’) than symphony, the overuse of pentatonic themes may provide a generically ‘folky’ feel but curiously nothing of the traditional Indian music that Kaufmann had moved to India to study. Vienna-born Rubin, a pupil of Franz Schmidt and – in Paris – Milhaud, also ignored local traditions and remained steadfastly Viennese in style (he returned home in the late 1940s), and his Fourth Symphony (1943 45) is Austrian through and through. Originally titled War and Peace (no Tolstoy connection) and in four movements, in 1972 Kaufmann replaced the final two movements with a subtler, more ambivalent final ‘Pastorale’ based on the ‘Dies irae’ plainsong. A not insignificant utterance, Peter Laki’s drawing of parallels in the booklet with the war symphonies of Shostakovich does Kaufmann’s music no favours. There is much to admire in the first movement, inspired by Brecht’s Kinderkreuzzug 1939, and finale, but the central ‘Dies irae’ is overlong. The Orchestra Now’s performance is nonetheless well executed, and Avie’s recording is splendid.