If you have never heard Somewhere Over the Rainbow fitted with a Hebrew text and performed by a chazan with a voice worthy of Broadway’s finest, backed by a perfectly honed a cappella male vocal quartet, then it is time you heard Mosaic Voices.
This Jewish British ensemble of four very different singers was brought together a decade ago by the conductor Michael Etherton (who is also chief executive of UK Jewish Film) at the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater, where it is still resident choir. Now, in its tenth year, its second album is about to be released for Holocaust Memorial Day: Letter to Kamilla —Music in Jewish Memory.
The eponymous Kamilla Breuer was Etherton’s great-grandmother. Born in Vienna, she died in Auschwitz, together with her husband and sister. She never knew that her last epistle had indeed reached her beloved daughter, who had managed to emigrate with her husband first to Milan, then Derbyshire.
“The letter is very, very poignant,” Etherton says, “written in a style and way of being that doesn’t exist any more, with poetic and flowery language from a woman who was very loving towards her family. Her words are full of yearning for them.”
Previously Etherton had regarded this history as something deeply private. During the dark days of the pandemic, however, he showed Kamilla’s letter to Mosaic Voices’ baritone and resident composer, Benjamin Till. “It struck him how moving it was, and he asked if it would be OK for him to set parts of it to music. That was the start of the whole album, which we called Letter to Kamilla because it is a response to that letter 80 years later.”
Many of the surrounding pieces on the recording are drawn from the group’s repertoire for services and festivals; some go back hundreds of years, or even more. There are also Jewish folksongs in Ladino and Yiddish and a new setting by the young Australian composer Meta Cohen of Sim Shalom.

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Mosaic's album cover

“We’re a proudly British vocal ensemble,” Etherton says. “Our members make up a diverse cross-section of the Jewish community, our oldest immigrant community in Britain. We were very aware of our position as custodians of The Voice of Prayer and Praise, the oldest collection of British Jewish choral music that we have; it’s the Jewish answer to Christian Victorian hymn books. It was edited by the then musical director of the New West End Synagogue, so we feel a responsibility to look after and develop it. It’s affectionately known as The Blue Book. Many of its tunes are sung across the world, but it is quite hard for contemporary musicians to read.
“One of our projects with Benjamin Till was to rearrange around about 100 of its pieces for our ensemble, and we also arranged it for a mixed female and male choir.” The Blue Book became their first album, released in 2018 to considerable acclaim, with Jewish Renaissance calling it “intriguing and impressive”.
All of this music is fine fodder for the counter-tenor Karl Gietzmann, the tenor Miles d’Cruz, the baritone Benjamin Till and the bass Dickon Gough — singers drawn from the very different disciplines of early music, folk, music theatre and opera, which gives their collective sound an unmistakable and distinctly unusual atmosphere.
Besides being a supremely gifted theatrical composer and singer, Till is an award-winning film-maker; the group has been reaping the benefits in poetically visualised videos of their songs, mixing Jewish locations and the languid beauty of the British countryside.
Their move to wider notice through recording and film has come about largely thanks to the pandemic, revealing an unexpected silver lining to this difficult period. “In March 2020, like all other musicians, we were sent home and everything was cancelled,” says Etherton. “Because we had no more live work, we decided to record some new music and make films of our singing of it as best we could. At the time, it was very difficult to see people and everything had to be done according to the regulations. In April and May 2020, we were singing outside, three metres from each other, or recording in separate rooms.”
These experiments became possible “because we were suddenly relieved of the urgency to deliver the whole time,” he comments. “As musical director I was able to do what I’ve always longed to do ever since I founded Mosaic Voices, which was to have a stable ensemble and create the sound that was the home I wanted.” With the good will of the synagogue and the community behind them, Etherton soon began to consider making another album; Letter to Kamilla is the result.
Etherton grew up in Stanmore and studied at Oxford University, where he started conducting in earnest, steeped in the British choral tradition that is nurtured by the Oxbridge college chapels. It helped to instil in him a crucial sense of perspective and context, which underpins his aims for Mosaic Voices.
“I felt that, as a community, we don’t take our music seriously enough,” he says. “Some of us might love it, we’ll be affectionate about it, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. And until we do, from a musical point of view, no one else will take us seriously either.
“In this album, I wanted us show that Anglo-Jewish choral music can inspire and transcend alongside the best in English choral music, and that it should be embraced and celebrated as part of the English choral tradition. That’s quite an ambitious position to take. But, you know, you have to have an ambition!”
Now, 80 years after Kamilla’s death, he is fulfilling another ambition: creating a tribute to his great-grandmother, her beloved family and those who shared their tragic fate.
Writing in the CD notes, he puts it succinctly: “We want Kamilla to know that, although she, her husband, and her sister, Minka, lost their lives in the Holocaust, all her children survived, and lived their lives successfully and happily in Britain, as proud Jewish people. Hitler’s mission failed.”

Letter to Kamilla is out today on Chandos Records