Dreams of Spain

Hajdu composed Dreams of Spain in 1991 for alto, tenor, narrator and orchestra, taking as its subject the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The combination of sung voices with a speaker is characteristic of his vocal-orchestral writing, which draws on liturgical cantillation and on the folk material he had collected as a young man in Hungary. Hajdu, born in Budapest in 1932, reached Israel by way of Paris and the classes of Milhaud and Messiaen, and taught for decades at Bar-Ilan University.