David Fligg
VL
Biography
David Fligg is a Visiting Professor at the Universaity of Chester. He was a co-founder of the AHRC-funded Performing the Jewish Archive international project (2014-2018) at the School of Music, University of Leeds, for which he was Project Consultant. From July 2019 to February 2020, David was co-curator of the Gideon Klein centenary festival, Gido’s Coming Home!, in the Czech Republic which commemorated the centenary of Gideon Klein who was one of a number of significant Czech Jewish musicians who were interned in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) prison camp and ghetto, later to be murdered in Auschwitz. David’s critical biography on Klein, ‘Letter from Gideon’, was first published, in Czech, by P3K Publishing (Prague) in December 2019. The English version, ‘Don’t forget about me: The short life of Gideon Klein, composer and pianist’, was published in November 2022. David’s chapter on Klein’s String Trio is in ‘The Routledge Handbook to Music under German Occupation’, and two chapters, including one on Klein’s melodrama Topol (The Poplar Tree), are in the 2020 publication ‘Torso eines Lebens Der Komponist und Pianist Gideon Klein‘. His theatrical presentation ‘Gideon Klein: Portrait of a Composer’ has been widely performed, and was produced at the RNCM for Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2020. It was adapted by the production company Modalways as part of a 2025 tour. His book ‘A Concise Guide to Orchestral Music’ is published by Mel Bay Publications. Prior to retirement in 2020, David lectured at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he was also an Honorary Research Fellow. Contact Dr David Fligg: d.fligg@chester.ac.uk