The art music of Israel is performed at the Kennedy Center in the Pro Musica Hebraica series, recently featuring the Ariel Quartet.
Washington
Some years ago, Charles and Robyn Krauthammer were discussing a conundrum: To many who knew about Jewish or Hebraic music, their conception was limited to three things: Klezmer (the infectious Yiddish dance-band music with its weeping clarinet skirls); Israeli folk music typified by “Hava Nagila,” the ubiquitous wedding dance tune; and synagogue music for cantor, choir or congregation. Yet the rich repertoire of Jewish classical music was generally unknown. By “Jewish classical music,” the Krauthammers were thinking of concert music—art music composed by Jews (or even non-Jews) that shares a common inspiration in the ancient modes, melodies and sometimes Hebrew and Yiddish texts of traditional Jewish culture in Europe, the eastern Mediterranean region and beyond.
Mr. Krauthammer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist with a former psychiatric practice in his back pocket. Ms. Krauthammer is a sculptor and painter with a former international law practice in hers. In 2008 they founded Pro Musica Hebraica, an annual concert series at the Kennedy Center consecrated, according to its mission statement, to exposing its audience “to the magnificent range of Jewish music” and “reintegrat[ing] the Jewish musical past and present into the mainstream repertoire of chamber and symphonic musical performance.”
The Kennedy Center’s prominence has lent the enterprise a visibility it might have lacked had it been produced at a synagogue. Moreover, from the start, Pro Musica Hebraica has engaged important artists, among them ARC Ensemble, the Biava Quartet, clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein and pianist Marc-André Hamelin. This past February pianist Evgeny Kissin performed sonatas by Ernest Bloch and Alexander Veprik, and recited Yiddish verse by Haim Nahman Bialik and Yitzhak Leibush Peretz.
On Dec. 14 at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, Pro Musica Hebraica trained its eye on the art music of Israel, with a return appearance by the youthful Ariel Quartet—violinists Gershon Gerchikov and Alexandra Kazovsky, violist Jan Grüning and cellist Amit Even-Tov. The concert was recorded and will be broadcast on radio station Classical WETA‘s “Front Row Washington” sometime in spring 2015.
The program showcased three generations of Israeli composers, and featured works by Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984), Mark Kopytman (1929-2011) and Menachem Wiesenberg (b. 1950). Ben-Haim immigrated to Israel from Germany; Kopytman, from Soviet Ukraine. Mr. Wiesenberg is a Sabra (an Israeli native). None of their rigorously modernist music displays the overt Yiddish sound of, say, the Klezmer tune that enlivens the third movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, or even the deliberate Hebraic flavor of Bloch’s tone poem for cello and orchestra, “Schelomo.” But when you listen carefully the music’s roots make themselves apparent.
Ben-Haim, the “father of modern Israeli Classical music,” is the earliest and most familiar of the three composers. His works in a variety of genres have appeared in the international concert arena for well over half a century. He was also the teacher of many students, including the conductor Eliahu Inbal, the composer and art collector Henri Lazarof, and the composer Shulamit Ran. Born Paul Frankenburger in Munich, Ben-Haim (which means “son of Haim,” which was his father’s Hebrew name) changed his name just before moving to Palestine in 1933. His First String Quartet (1937) was among his earliest compositions after immigrating.
The opening movement begins with a pastoral-sounding theme for viola joined by cello, and includes an affecting episode in which both violins and the viola alternate playing their theme against a gossamer fabric of cello harmonics (very high, silvery flutelike notes played by softly touching the strings with the fingertips rather than pressing them against the fingerboard). Though some hear allusions to Debussy and Ravel in the writing, to these ears the music suggests Dvorak’s music filtered through a 20th-century sensibility. Indeed the slow third movement, marked Largo, very much sounds like a modernist reflection on the spiritual-like Largo in Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World.” The final movement, loosely built around a folklike dance theme, reflects a sophisticated urban wit rather than outright nostalgia.
Ben-Haim’s Prelude for String Quartet (1973) is based on a traditional Sephardic tune and weaves it into a broad contrapuntal texture. Instrumental lines cross and clash with moments of bracing dissonance, but the essential lyricism shines through, especially in the concluding passage in which the first violin rises melodically and hauntingly above the other three instruments, like the last flare of a dying candle.
Composer Mark Kopytman studied music at the Lviv and Moscow Conservatories while practicing as a physician. His String Quartet No. 3 (1969) opens with a languid, elegiac duo exploiting the muted, melancholy tone of the solo viola over pizzicato (i.e., plucked) cello accompaniment. Thereafter, enigmatic thrusts of melody are rich in repeated-note motifs evoking similar gestures in Yiddish songs, without implying direct quotations of any songs in particular.
In the second movement, tiny fragments of Ashkenazi (i.e., Eastern European Jewish) themes swirl in a dissonant vortex as Kopytman exploits every color of the string palette: earthy bowing in which you can almost feel the rosin on the horsehair scraping against the strings, gritty tone clusters, wild pizzicato patches, ghostly harmonics, percussive col legno accents (produced by striking the strings with the wood of the bow). Overall a Shostakovich-like sense of anger prevails, relieved by the song or chant fragments.
Relatively brief but moving, Mr. Wiesenberg’s “Between the Sacred and the Profane” (1991) opens with the chant of the viola against sustained flutelike octave tones of cello and violin, and successive episodes of pleading chantlike melody recall the emotional intimacy of synagogue cantillation. In the second movement, threads of Ladino wedding songs spin around one another to produce bright, open string textures that evoke the warmth of the eastern Mediterranean sun.
Throughout the evening the Ariel Quartet—whose members studied with both Kopytman and Mr. Wiesenberg—rose to each composer’s challenge with vigorous aplomb and a palpable joie de vivre born of understanding and affection for the works channeled through their own consummate musicianship.
