Israeli Music > Reviews

British-Israeli Musical Dialogues, South Bank Centre 30 November 2008

Review by Malcolm Miller

The music of Tzvi Avni, one of Israel’s leading composers, formed the centrepiece of a stimulating three-concert event, Musical Dialogues: British-Israeli Music Day at the South Bank on 30 November 2008, which featured several UK premieres and traced shared aesthetic concerns from early 20th century folk music revivals to post-modern eclecticism. 

Avni spoke about his life and career in conversation with Humphrey Burton in the first concert (Purcell Room). Born in 1927 in Saarbrucken, Germany, Avni immigrated to Israel as a child in 1935 to escape the Nazi persecution, and his experience living alongside Arab villages and families in his youth influenced his Arabic-Jewish musical synthesis in his early works of the 40s and 50s. He evolved a modernist style after working at the Princeton Electronic Music Center and at Tanglewood in the 1960s, where he encountered the European and American avant-garde, and figures like Copland, Lukas Foss and Xenakis. In 1971 he became Professor at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and Head of the Electronic Music Studio, and since the 1970s Avni has displayed an interest in Jewish mysticism, adding modal and neo-tonal elements to his style. As Chairman of the Israel Jeunesses Musicales, has also composed works for the Arab-Israeli Youth Orchestra. He introduced three chamber works: Mirage (2004) for violin, cello, piano, double bass and percussion, performed deftly by the Thallein Ensemble (Birmingham Conservatory), the String Quartet no.3 ‘Paths of Time’ (2003), in an engaging account by the Brodowski Quartet (Trinity College of Music), and the Saxophone Quartet, played superbly by the Sirocco Saxophone Quartet (Royal College of Music), in which the expressive heart is a ‘Homage to Gesualdo’ that transforms the madrigal Moro Lasso. 

Saarbrucken’s celebration of Avni’s 80th birthday in 2007 led to a new work for string trio ‘Credo’, which received a highly charged UK premiere a week earlier, 24 November 2008, at the Spiro Ark, Enfield Street, W1, by the Offenburger Trio, who had premiered it in 2007. The ensemble fervently projected its granite-like sculpted blocs and gestures, tempered with dance like delicacy and veiled half-lit shades of sound, through to its involving aleatoric climax.

The second South Bank concert (Purcell Room) traced music from across the generations, starting with a spirited Concerto Accademico (1924/5) by Vaughan Williams, with the Yehudi Menuhin School Orchestra under their Musical Director Malcolm Singer, with Ben Baker as eloquent soloist.. A quartet from the orchestra performed Tzvi Avni’s Summer Strings’, String Quartet no. 1 (1962), alert to the music’s exciting drama, while Avni’s On the Verge of Time (1983) received a fine account by pianist Amit Yahav, winner of the 2008 Spiro Ark Israeli Music Competition. Yahav accompanied another winner, violinist Litsah Tunnah, in Three Songs without Words, one of the most popular works by Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984), Israel’s most famous composer, who pioneered the exotic ‘Eastern Mediterranean’ style. Other premieres included Prelude and Fugue for Ten Violas, by Oliver Kentish, a British cellist based in Iceland, with solos for each viola is based on the B-A-C-H motif, performed vividly by the Viola Ensemble of Trinity College of Music. The young Israeli composer Lior Navok’s Saxophone Quartet also received its UK premiere by the Sirocco Saxophone Quartet, displaying echoes of Jazz and American postmodernism, and highlighted the saxophone’s vocal qualities. Drama and colour infused the finely-wrought Bartlebooth, for clarinet, cello and piano by Joe Cutler, Head of Composition at Birmingham Conservatoire, performed with conviction by the Thallein Ensemble, who concluded with Thomas Ades’s The Origin of the Harp.

The climactic evening concert, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, opened with the European premiere of Noam Sheriff’s evocative Viola Concerto Canarian Vespers, with Canadian-British-Israeli violist Rivka Golani as soloist, supported by the Yehudi Menuhin School Orchestra, conducted by Malcolm Singer. The extended solo viola cantabile passages proved an ideal foil for Golani’s rich and impassioned tone. The next UK premiere was Remember Just the Brightness, a concerto for oud and orchestra by Michael Wolpe, Head of Composition at the Jerusalem Academy and one of several Israeli composers who have composed for the renowned oudist Taiseer Elias, Head of Arabic Music Department at the Jerusalem Academy. Elias was richly supported by the luscious orchestral sounds of the Eden Sinfonia under Daniel Cohen, prize-winning RAM graduate and protégée of Daniel Barenboim. Wolpe’s penchant for Arabic-Jewish folk-inspired synthesis was evidenced in the build up from a slow introduction to the livelier additive dance rhythms, spiced by exotic percussion. The virtuoso improvised cadenza was later echoed in a separated work by Elias, an improvisatory excursus in the style of Arabic taqsim with mesmeric syncopations.  

Se Questo e un Uomo (If this is a Man) Five Orchestral Songs on poems by Primo Levi (1998) received a compelling UK premiere with Sharon Rostoff-Zamir, whose rich soprano projected the individual lines and phrases to maximal effect. Avni’s vivid settings, here sung in English translation, recalled Mahler and Shostakovich, always responsive to the poem’s meditation on inhumanity, based on Levi’s Holocaust experiences. The five songs are structured as a set, the steady march like pulse of the first two intensifying to the almost brutal cataclysmic third song about destruction, giving way via a bleak fourth song to a more optimistic lyrical celebration of compassion. Maxwell Davies’ superb Orkney Wedding with Sunrise concluded the event with vivid colour, Daniel Cohen throughout eliciting a varied and rich sound from the orchestra. Highland bagpiper Finley MacDonald brought the evocative tone poem to a riveting, and haunting close.

Malcolm Miller © 2009

A full review appears in Tempo (CUP) – April 2009 issue.

updated April 11, 2009