Israeli Music > Reviews

Oriental Spice
Three UK Premieres at ‘A Celebration of Israeli Music’
Malcolm Miller enjoys new music at the Royal Academy of Music

‘A Celebration of Israeli Music’ at the Duke’s Hall of the Royal Academy of Music, presented by Spiro Ark, was a special occasion that attracted a large audience to enjoy  a variety of contemporary music including three UK premieres. It was introduced by the patron of the day Lillian Hochhauser FRCM, who highlighted the great achievements in music and arts during Israel’s 60 year history, and the value of organisation such as Spiro Ark, and their music division Tzavta, directed by the cellist Sagi Hartov, who seek to promote these gifts for the benefit of a wide audience. The date of the ‘Celebration of Israeli Music’, Sunday 4 November 2007, was poignantly apt, marking, as it did, the twelfth anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and indeed as a centrepiece was Yizkor (Memorial) by Oedoen Partos, one of the four major Israeli composers featured in the concert, which spanned from the pioneer generation who came to Palestine in the 1930s including Ben-Haim to the current generation of Menachem Wiesenberg and Michael Wolpe.

A potent overture was provided by the She’koyokh Klezmer Ensemble who gave an arresting performance of two contrasting ‘klezmer’ pieces, the first slow and meditative the second dance like and fizzing. The clarinettist had a beautifully vocal tone, in the true klezmer style, enhanced by violin, and supported by accordion and double bass. With its supple communicative approach, She’koyokh set an upbeat tone for the rest of the concert. The first main work was the UK premiere of the Octet, Homage to Mendelssohn by Menachem Wiesenberg. Wiesenberg is one of the most versatile composers and arrangers in Israel, recipient of the 1998 Prime Minister’s Award and keen to combine Arabic instruments with Western ensembles, as in his Concertino for Oud and Orchestra. His Octet uses the same arrangement of two quartets as Mendelssohn’s famous Octet (and thus an ideal sister piece to that most popular of chamber works. Wiesenberg reinterpreted several of the motifs of Mendelssohn’s Octet in new and radical new ways. The single movement unfolds as a type of elegy, the ever changing textures matched by an expressively fluid discourse. Idiomatically suited to the medium, each string quartet works both as a group and in combinations, with changing dialogues, dovetailed exchanges, a great variety of articulation and dynamics, and much appeal to its variegated pastel shading. The composer was present to acknowledge the enthusiastic reception to the work. To follow, the violinist Ruth Waterman, partnered by Benjamin Frith, gave an impassioned, enthralling account of the Three Songs without Words by Paul Ben-Haim, Israel’s most famous composer, and leader of the ‘Eastern Mediterranean School’ with its compelling east-West synthesis. The first ‘Song’ with its elegant long melodic lines over repeated pulsating colourful chords evoked the ‘pitiless heat of the Judean Hills’, as its programme intended, with just the right amount of rich melismatic ornamentation to imbue the suave French style with oriental spice. The second ‘Song’, intended to depict the ‘monotonous babbling of an oriental story teller’ was far from monotonous, in fact riveting with its ostinato motif relentlessly repeated yet flexibly expressive. The final eloquent ‘Song’ was moving, its harp-like piano flourishes overlaid with sustained ornamental turns, soaring high above in the violin, concluding with a searching, elusive mood.

A highlight of the concert was the thrilling performance of Yizkor by Rivka Golani, one of the most acclaimed of Partos’s students. Golani underlined her sense of being privileged to have studied with such a great man, who had studied in Hungary with Hubay at the Budapest Academy, and was recruited to the fledgling Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936 by Huberman. Partos became principal viola of the IPO and founder member of the Israel Quartet, and poignantly this year was the centenary of his birth and the 30th anniversary of his death, as well as the 70th anniversary of the IPO. Golani’s moving and incisive powerful performance was infused with a beautiful tone; Ben Ellin conducted the EMFEB orchestra with sensitivity and delicacy, as during the cadenza, where sustained violins cushioned the viola’s striving strident chords with a soulful aura.

The climax of the concert was the UK premiere of the Flute Concerto by Michel Wolpe, performed with great artistry and beauty of tone by Yossi Arnheim, Principal Flautist of the IPO with the EMFEB orchestra. Wolpe, who is a Professor at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, is Artistic Director of a fascinating annual festival of 'Music in the Desert' which attracts large audiences each December to perform and enjoy wide ranging musical styles at the Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev Desert. His style style steers a telling course between modernism and multiculturalism, aiming self-consciously at a postmodern assimilation of middle-eastern folk idioms and their symbiosis with western techniques. However rather than westernising the oriental elements as in the earlier Israeli music, here the materials are set into a confrontation, their identity retained distinctly yet contrasted, and combined. The initial theme was a syncopated, lively flute tune that seemed to evoke Arabic pastoral scenes or sailors’ hornpipe, a blend of the Negev and Plymouth Hoe, perhaps. This and several other folk like themes were all Wolpe’s original material , displaying an thorough assimilation of middle eastern elements, not as foreign material but rather as part of the fabric of a multi layered Israeli identity. After the orchestra echoed the skipping flute theme, a new phase introduced helter-skelter flute passagework over simpler textures in strings, where atonal, chromatic textures dominate the idiom with engaging, gripping drama. Especially idiomatic of Middle-Eastern and Arabic music were the many unison and octave statements of the main themes by the entire orchestra. This monodic style has propulsive energy, strengthened by incisive drum patterns, using bass and side drum. After a main first section the music moved into a type of movement, a new phase in which the flute was accompanied by Debka, announcing a lively syncopated dance, in which the orchestra gradually joined. The final movement intensified the dance, with more Arabic sounding textures in the buotyant conclusion. The work symbolized an optimistic vision for Israeli music, a colourful panorama responding to the variety of cultures and traditions and fully engaged with a contemporary musical idiom. A final work crowned the concert, Menachem Wiesneberg’s arrangement of 'Song of the Land' by one of Israel's most popular song composers, Sasha Argov.' Wiesenberg’s luminous textures added much to the expressive, lyrical yearning of the work. The conductor Ben Ellin observed how the concert was an important first stage for the EMFEB orchestra in an ongoing project to increase collaboration with younger talented composers from Israel. That process is also a feature of the Jewish Music Institute’s ‘Visiting Composer from Israel’ project, initiated in 2004-7 with Menachem Wiesenberg, and which continues with Michael Wolpe as the incumbent VCI. Certainly the performances of music of such potent quality in this concert affirmed the value of such projects which one hopes will evolve increasingly in the future.

Malcolm Miller © 2007

posted September 18, 2009