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British-Israeli Music Day, South Bank Centre, London

Reviewed by Michael Church
Thursday, 4 December 2008

Music may be an "abstract" art, but it always gains force through being set in context, and that is why events such as British-Israeli Music Day are so effective. And there's no better way of hitting the buttons than by putting a composer on stage alongside those playing his works.

So it was a pleasure thus to encounter 81-year-old Tzvi Avni, a humble, humorous survivor of Thirties pogroms, whose musical journey has taken him, via the limits of the electronic avant-garde, into a late-flowering period in which his work has cleansed itself of all excess.

"Sometimes you're lucky enough to get paid, other times your commission comes from the heart," Avni told Humphrey Burton, as his musicians limbered up. His Mirage for piano trio, double bass and percussion was a kosher commission, and sprang from his fascination with Miro's paintings. His music had the same mercurial charm. Avni's Paths of Time string quartet was as densely constructed as Bartok, and had the spring-heeled energy: the brilliant Brodowski Quartet are a group to watch out for. His Saxophone Quartet did extraordinary things to a morbid madrigal by egregious composer-murderer Carlo Gesualdo.

But the climax of this composer's showcase came later in the day, with a performance by soprano Sharon Rostorf-Zamir with the Eden Sinfonia of Avni's settings of five poems by Primo Levi. If the first is nightmarish – ranks of warriors silently marching as the sun rises – others reflect the desolation of concentration-camp life; the most savage – written shortly before Levi's suicide – evokes commensurate savagery in the music. Avni's treatment of the final poem quotes Monteverdi and Italian folk-song in a misty melange.