January 08, 2006
HOW TO SPEND THAT CHANUKAH GELT
Wondering what to do with all that Chanukah gelt in the way of gift certificates or cash?... JMWC can recommend a few musical solutions, one sest for the classical repertoire and one for YIddish.Paul Ben-Haim, Vol. 2 on Centaur CRC 2766 and Piano Music of Paul Ben-Haim on Centaur CRC 2506 Gila Goldstein, piano, Yehonatan Berick, violin, Inbal Segev, cello and Alexander Fiterstein, clarinet are featured on the 2766 and Gila Goldstein is soloist for 2506. The works are (2766) Music for Piano 1957, op 53, Variations on a Hebrew Melody for Piano, Violin and Cello, Chamsin for Piano solo, Pastorale Variee for Clarinet and Paino, op. 31b and Music for Piano 1967, op. 67. The works for 2506 are: Sonatina, op. 38; Melody and Variations, op 42, Suite No. 1, op. 20a, Suite No. 2, op. 20b, Sonata, Op. 49 and Five Pieces, Op. 34. This repertoire is not as widely known in the United States as it should be. The pieces reflect Ben-Haim's efforts to create an Israeli national style while retaining the influences of his European background and training. These works for solo piano and those small chamber ensembles will be the perfect background to snowy afternoons or evenings this winter and beyond. These works are available through Amazon and elsewhere.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/103-5599130-1150268?url=index%3Dblended&field-keywords=gila+goldstein&Go.x=8&Go.y=13&Go=Go
Af Di Gasn Fun Der shtot by Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman
This collection of recently composed Yiddish songs reviewed earlier on JMWC:
Featuring: Michael Alpert, Sharon Bernstein, Adrienne Cooper, Margot Leverett, Frank London , Peter Rushefsky, Binyumin Schaechter, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, Lorin Sklamberg, Deborah Strauss, and Theresa Tova. In addition, special care was obviously taken to match the song with the performer, because each of the voices is especially fitted and suited to that selection, in their timbre, mood, and interpretations of the songs. Having heard numerous albums by each of the performers, I was highly impressed by the tight fit of selection to singer. New to me is the delightfully clear voice of Sharon Jan Bernstein. Adrienne Cooper and Theresa Tova were perfect in every nuance. This "all star cast" included Michael, Margot, Frank, Deborah and Lorin as listed above. The composer, Beyle Shaechter-Gottesman also sings her ballad to September 11th. With all the insight and weight of the Yiddish community's enormous losses, this song became especially poignant with the simple rendition of this memorial. One remembers that thousands of Americans attempted to express their feelings about this event in song, so it is fitting that a Yiddish song becomes such an effective conveyance to express the grief of New York. Of special note also is the maturity in Peter Rushefsky's playing. It's a pleasure to witness the growth of this rising artist in several recent albums. This album insert includes texts in Yiddish, transliteration and English translation. For more information: http://www.yiddishlandrecords.com/
May 13, 2005
LOST CONCERTO COMES ALIVE IN SARATOGA
Work of forgotten Jewish composer heard at last
LOST CONCERTO COMES ALIVE IN SARATOGA
By Richard Scheinin
reprinted here with the kind permission of the San Jose Mercury News
Last Sunday afternoon, in a Saratoga church, the newly reconstructed piano concerto of a largely forgotten Jewish composer named Eric Zeisl was given its world premiere. This was a major and unlikely event, for Zeisl, born 100 years ago this month, had been a formidable composer, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna who made his way to Los Angeles, raised a family, wrote prolifically -- everything from film music to opera -- and then died in 1959 of a heart attack after teaching a night class at Los Angeles City College. Igor Stravinsky was among those who grieved his passing, a testament to Zeisl's standing among composers in Los Angeles, where Stravinsky was an émigré. Yet few of Zeisl's works were performed in his lifetime and not a single one had been given a premiere since his death at age 53. And now, out of the blue, Jason Klein, a conductor with an addiction for rare repertory, was about to lead the Saratoga Symphony, a spirited little orchestra filled with devoted amateurs, in a performance of Zeisl's Piano Concerto in C Major, completed 53 years ago and relegated to a dusty drawer in Los Angeles. (more... to read the complete article...)
Recovering a voice
``The first performance ever awaits you in a few minutes,'' Klein, a gabby maestro with a knack for creating excitement, told his 250 or so listeners at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, the orchestra's base of operations. Zeisl's daughter, Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg -- she is married to Ronald Schoenberg, son of Arnold Schoenberg, the composer, who also was a refugee in Los Angeles -- had driven up from Southern California for the big event and was seated in the ninth row. So was Malcolm S. Cole, a retired UCLA musicologist and Zeisl's biographer, whom Klein now introduced as ``the world's leading expert on the music of Eric Zeisl.''
Loud applause broke out as Cole, very much the rumpled professor, got up and told the audience about Zeisl's ``odyssey'': barely escaping Vienna in November 1938, the day after Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom, and moving to Paris, then New York and finally Los Angeles, where he wrote the piano concerto in three movements that are ``spacious, technically demanding and hauntingly
beautiful.''
A tingly excitement filled the church as Cole described the detective work involved in resurrecting the music: Zeisl had left two messy, handwritten versions that needed to be transcribed and cleared of ``gremlins,'' the wrong notes and other miscues that inevitably sneak into a score before it comes to life in rehearsal. And this piece had never been rehearsed by an orchestra until last month.
Still, ``the recovery of the voice behind these notes'' is well under way, Cole assured the audience, proudly describing the concerto's ``soaring melodies, irresistible dances, intense modal harmonies and intricate counterpoint -- you are sharing Zeisl's journey from exile to sanctuary.'' And then Klein blessed the music's maiden voyage: ``May this concerto have a long life,'' he said, calling out the soloist, pianist Daniel Glover of San Francisco, who has a history of learning prodigiously difficult music in
short amounts of time.
A youthful 47-year-old in a black tuxedo, Glover, smiling shyly, sat down at the piano and, following Klein's downbeat, launched into Zeisl's forgotten concerto. A dignified sadness Wow! Immediately, there was a wonderful tunefulness, a unison melody for strings
and piano -- and it was soaring, gorgeous, the piano part now shadowed, a little shakily, by one of the horns. Amid trumpet fanfares and flying violins -- out of tune, but spirited, these string players -- Glover, not shaky at all, rocketed through the big melodies, adorned with all sorts of opulent trills and tumbling flourishes, and broke out into massive cadenzas.
``This guy really plays,'' Cole murmured after the lengthy first movement, which had been filled with sharply percussive dancing passages and ecstatically clanging chords in the keyboard's upper regions. The glinty brilliance of the music, and its way of putting the piano in dialogue with the orchestra, was reminiscent of Bartók. Its playfulness recalled Prokofiev. Clearly, Zeisl had his influences, but also, as Cole had been saying, his own voice: In the second movement, it was heard in the haunting tunefulness, the piano painting notes against a soft backdrop of teeming strings.
In the third movement, the mood turned grave, spikier and more dissonant, with a whirling danse macabre and then a Semitic melody, dressed up like Rachmaninoff, but still expressing a dignified sadness.
The audience sat rapt as Glover, an incisive, exciting and apparently
tireless player, drove the music toward its big chiming finish.
Then the audience burst into applause. What an event! ``Bravo!'' shouted Zeisl-Schoenberg. Standing, she looked at Cole, seated next to her, and, with a big smile, said, ``Well, that was a thrill.''
``Oh,'' answered the beaming Cole, obviously beside himself, ``that was exciting.'' ``He's terrific,'' Zeisl-Schoenberg, still applauding, said of Glover. ``He discovered the voice behind the notes,'' Cole said, nodding. ``They all did.''
Zeisl-Schoenberg, a retired professor of German language and literature at Pomona College, seemed happily overwhelmed by the experience: In a way, it had brought her father to life. She could recall so much about him: his piano playing, teaching and composing in the family's West Hollywood home. She even recalled living room rehearsals for the piano concerto with Eda Schlatter Jameson, the intended soloist for a performance in Vienna that never materialized.
Odyssey of a concerto
A melancholy man who missed his country of birth, Zeisl never returned to Vienna. How odd: Here in Saratoga, in an Episcopal church, 46 years after his death, the concerto finally was born: ``The second movement had a wistfulness, a sadness that reflected what my father was like,'' Zeisl-Schoenberg said. ``My father was full of melody.'' Broadly speaking, the rediscovery of Zeisl's piano concerto is part of the renewed interest in music by Jewish composers who were persecuted by the Nazis. Some of these composers were forever silenced: Viktor Ullmann was gassed at
Auschwitz in 1944; Erwin Schulhoff died of tuberculosis in a Bavarian concentration camp in 1942. Others escaped, some landing in Los Angeles, which became sanctuary to an
entire community of Jewish émigré composers: Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Alexandre Tansman, Hanns Eisler, Ernst Toch, Nathaniel Shilkret.
Zeisl -- who barely knew Schoenberg, by the way, though his daughter
eventually would carry Schoenberg's name -- was among the youngest and least well-known of the bunch. He had fled Vienna at age 33, before his musical reputation was firmly established. Living in West Hollywood with his wife, Gertrud, a Viennese lawyer who became a Los Angeles schoolteacher, he went to work for MGM, scoring music for
``Lassie Come Home,'' ``Baton'' and other films, but never received an on-screen credit.
He turned to teaching (one of his students at City College was Jerry Goldsmith, who became a distinguished Hollywood film composer). And encouraged by composer friends in California, including Darius Milhaud, he turned exclusively
to classical composition: operas, ballet music, choral music, all sorts of chamber works and orchestral opuses, including a cello concerto, which he never heard. It was performed at his memorial service. There have been occasional recordings of Zeisl's compositions through the years, as well as a handful of performances. Last November, his Requiem Ebraico, written in 1944 after he learned his parents had perished in the camps, was
performed at Stanford University. But the piano concerto -- this was a mystery.
Luckily, there lives in Saratoga a Stanford engineering professor named Robert Feigelson, an aficionado of forgotten composers, who once studied piano with a niece of Shilkret's. Two years ago, Feigelson assisted Sterling Records, a small Swedish label, in the release of a CD containing music by one of his
heroes, the pianist and composer Franz Xaver Scharwenka. Coincidentally, he learned, Klein was about to mount a Saratoga Symphony performance of a Scharwenka concerto, with the Russian-born, Fremont-reared piano prodigy Natasha Paremski as soloist. But Klein needed money to stage the event, so Feigelson began to raise it, receiving help from another lover of obscure music, Jim Semadeni of Kansas City.
It was Semadeni who mentioned the Zeisl concerto to Feigelson, suggesting that the composer's family might have a manuscript.
And so the Eric Zeisl project was born, on the cusp of the composer's centenary. Feigelson mentioned it to Klein who, naturally, was enthused at the chance to introduce his Saratoga
audience to more glorious music from the margins of history.
Glover, a natural for this sort of hyper-virtuosic challenge, was enlisted.
So was a Stanford music undergraduate named David Nunez, who transcribed the handwritten music into a printed score. One thing led to the next and soon Zeisl-Schoenberg and Cole were embroiled in the plot. The professor had been studying Zeisl's music since the late '60s, when one of Zeisl's nephews, enrolled in one of Cole's classes, said ``he wanted to write a paper on his uncle, who happened to be a composer,'' Cole recalled
after Sunday's performance. ``I said, `Who's that?' ''
```Eric Zeisl.'' ``That got the ball rolling,'' Cole said. He began visiting Gertrud Zeisl, who lived within walking distance of the UCLA campus: ``Friday was our day.'' He set down an extensive oral history, helped establish the Eric Zeisl Archive at UCLA and, with Barbara Barclay, a colleague, co-authored ``Armseelchen:
The Life and Music of Eric Zeisl'' (Greenwood Press), published in 1984. 'Armseelchen' is German for ``poor little soul'' and also is the name of a song written by Zeisl as a young man. ``Zeisl felt it was symbolic of his life,'' Cole said. Eventually, Cole and Zeisl-Schoenberg hope there will be more performances
of the concerto and a professional recording. It isn't likely that the Saratoga Symphony will be involved: After all, its
tympanist counts out loud; its string players are not intonation specialists. But the doctors, lawyers and computer engineers who play in the gutsy little orchestra sure put themselves into Sunday's performance. It was imperfect but, more importantly, it got inside Zeisl's lyricism, his melancholy, his spirit. Afterward, dozens of listeners lingered, congratulating Klein, Glover, Zeisl-Schoenberg and Cole. ``Well, we were all part of a first,'' the professor said.
Glover was among the last to leave. ``I'm honored to have been involved in a project like this,'' he said. ``Everyone's thanking me and my feeling is -- what a feather in my cap.''
November 11, 2004
Hazzan Abraham Lopes Cardozo Celebrated 90th Birthday
(From Joods.nl, by Raya Lishansky, Translated by Irma Lopes Cardozo & Barry Mehler) http://www.joods.nl/archive/cultureel/muziek/JoodsNewsItem.2004-10-26.9494736971With the Uilenburger Synagogue [in Amsterdam, Netherlands] bursting at the seams, Hazzan Abraham Lopes Cardozo celebrated his 90th Birthday in concert with Santo Servicio, the choir of the Esnoga. The 17 man strong Santo Servicio[1] opened the concert with Baruch Habba, under the driven leadership of their director-singer Barry Mehler resurrecting it like a Phoenix after 63 years of silence. ... Read about it....
Prior to the official opening of the concert, Hazzan Abraham Lopes Cardozo received congratulations and best wishes from many members of the audience. Under the melody of Baruch Habba, Hazzan Cardozo walked from the back of the Shul and joined the choir in full force. This was one of the many impressive moments of the evening. Lopes Cardozo sang in this choir from 1922 until 1939; first as a boy soprano and later on as a young adult until he received an appointment as cantor in Suriname in 1939.
Lopes Cardozo embodies the living memory of the musical culture of the pre-war Portuguese Jewish community. Throughout the evening he drew from his rich memory of fragments of synagogue music sometimes ushered with amusement from the audience, as he would say: “I know it by heart!” People in the hall softly hummed some of the well-known melodies.
In a conversation with Barry Mehler, Lopes Cardozo tells about Santo Servicio from before the war, a choir of volunteers, consisting of about 25 men and about 20 boys. Even famous singers like tenor Giacomo Aletrino were members of the choir. It was a touching moment when Hazzan Lopes Cardozo produced a small black leather-bound book. “In this book you can find the complete Seder Hazzanut of the Esnoga.” I copied the 140 pages from the original Seder Hazzanut when I went to the synagogue everyday with my father. This is a guide for the Hazzan for all services during the Jewish year; a kind of users-manual. You can find everything in it and I have added all the melodies of our tradition, so that I would not forget them. I knew that there was only a small chance that I would be able to get a job as Hazzan in Amsterdam. This little book traveled with me over the whole world, and now I am returning it home. Hazzan Lopes Cardozo presented this little book to Bram Palache, Parnas-member of the P.I.G. and one of the singers in the new Santo Servicio.
The evening’s program was musically filled with Santo Servicio and a male quartet. The traditional settings of Hallěl for the 1st and 2nd day Passover were again and again sung with a clear and strong voice by the Hazzan. The vocal highpoint of the evening was when the four soloists sang, "Mizmor l'David" a composition by Victor Schlesinger. This music had not been heard in Amsterdam for more than 60 years and was now made possible thanks to the cooperation of composer’s granddaughter Anna Schlesinger, who personally attended the concert.
The concert came to a close with a composition of L.A. Benavente, Shir Hamagnalot l'David Samachti. Afterwards there was a reception where the large audience was given the opportunity to raise a (non-alcoholic) glass to the health of Abraham Lopes Cardozo.
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[1] It was assumed for a long period of time that the sheet music of the vocal cultural heritage of the Amsterdam Portuguese liturgy as it was sung by Santo Servicio before the war and was lost. A few years ago, boxes with scores from the unique music from the Esnoga were discovered. A part of the scores has been inventoried, catalogued and ready to be (re-) used for services in the Esnoga. Santo Servicio was re-established in 2002 and has already sung multiple times during services in the Esnoga under the direction of Barry J. Mehler. The choir took part in the great "Three Cantors" concert that took place in 2003 in the Esnoga.
April 26, 2004
Rainlore's World of Music
Richard ("Renaissance Man") runs Rainlore's World of Music . It has lots of CD Reviews of Jewish music. For online reviews:
http://www.rainlore.demon.co.uk