By Gigi Yellen-Kohn, JTNews Correspondent
Along the multi-million dollar road to the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, a caravan seeking American Jewish roots music stopped in Seattle. Hazzan Ike Azose, now retired from leadership duties at Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, remembers the flurry of sophisticated video and audio production, and the simulated Sabbath service the Milken folks put together, four years ago, at the century-old South Seattle congregation founded by Sephardic Jews from the Island of Rhodes.
Will these Mediterranean melodies find their way onto one of the Milken Archive’s colorful commercial CD releases? A different Sephardic tradition, the one used at New York’s Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, has: Jewish Voices in the New World: Chants and Prayers from the American Colonial Era (with Hazzan Ira Rohde, Schola Hebraica, New London Children’s Choir, Neil Levin, conductor; Naxos CD 559411; www.milkenarchive.org).
“I haven’t heard from them since then,” Hazzan (Cantor) Azose says of the Milken Archive folks. In the meantime, what we have this season, musically, is an opportunity to appreciate three new releases in that Archive’s multiyear project, as well as a reminder that not all exotic Jewish music must be experienced electronically.
Seattle’s Jewish landscape includes another Sephardic congregation, too, founded by Jews from Turkey: Sephardic Bikur Cholim, where the music and order of prayers resembles, but is not identical to, the Rhodes tradition. During the 500 years since their ancestors were kicked out of Spain, these Jews developed melodies that suggest Arabic and Greek music. These melodies live, and can be heard daily, here in Seattle.
EB has produced an archive recording of its own, featuring Hazzan Azose in prayers for holidays—including Passover—and the Sabbath. With his spoken billboards and solo voice, the good cantor’s CD is not the sort of disc you’d put on for background entertainment: it is, indeed, a collection of tunes he and his community hope to keep alive. But in light of the Milken Archive’s Jewish Voices in the New World, Seattle aficionados of Jewish roots music deserve to know that “Sephardic” music is a many-branched tree, on which local flowers continue to bloom.
Jewish Voices in the New World represents the branch that went north out of Spain, to Amsterdam, and eventually to New Amsterdam/New York. Its music is not that of Seattle’s Mediterranean-rooted Sephardic congregations, but that of the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue in New York City. Recorded at the New West End Synagogue in London, it takes full advantage of cathedral-like acoustics, with music that includes not only the characteristic nasal cantorial solos, but also seductively monk-like chants performed by a choir of men and boys.
Seattle Symphony Music Director Gerard Schwarz is the conductor on two other recent releases from the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music. One is a concert setting of the Sabbath service by the early-20th-century French composer Darius Milhaud. (Milhaud: Service Sacré; Naxos 559409; www.milkenarchive.org) What qualifies his work as “American” is the familiar story of the European composer fleeing in the wake of fascist takeover: in this case, the German invasion of France in 1940.
As related in the (as usual, extensive) Milken CD notes, an invitation to conduct the Chicago Symphony made visas possible for Milhaud and family; his friend and musical colleague (and fellow Jewish émigré), the San Francisco Symphony’s conductor Pierre Monteaux, found him a teaching position in Oakland.
Far less famous than Ernest Bloch’s “Sacred Service,” this setting of the same liturgical passages distinguishes, yet again, the varieties of Jewish melody and harmony that have been nurtured during our centuries as a scattered European people.
Milhaud’s Jewish background was Provençal. Apparently, the Jews of Provence developed a musical tradition distinct from the Sephardic or Ashkenazic, and Milhaud drew upon that tradition here. Milhaud’s service was commissioned by Temple Emanu El in San Francisco in 1947, the same congregation that commissioned Bloch’s work.
Milhaud was one of a group of French jazz-age composers (“Les Six”) who embraced both jazz and popular music in their chamber, opera, and symphonic works. His Service Sacré floats into life (“Ma Tovu”) as a child of the aesthetic world that gave us Satie and Poulenc: an airy baritone, Yaron Windmueller, settles in atop a solo flute; feathery choruses cushion their duet on either side. Full-blown grandeur ebbs and flows, settling often into sunny harmonies. The addition of reader Rabbi Rodney Mariner probably works better in concert, especially given the starched-shirt delivery. The declamatory style may be historically accurate for this Union Prayer Book-era service, but it distances the listener from the tender orchestral and choral treatment so sensitively performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir and Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Maestro Schwarz (recorded in Prague).
Schwarz and the Seattle Sym-phony appear on one track of Milken Archive’s CD of music by the contemporary composer Bruce Adolphe (Naxos 559413; www.milkenarchive.org). The track, which was recorded in Seattle at Bastyr University Chapel, is a scene from his opera Mikhoels the Wise, based on historical accounts of the life, career, and murder of Solomon Mikhoels, a celebrated actor in the Soviet Yiddish theatre.
Once again, the exhaustive Milken Arch-ive research forces pour out paragraphs of background, historical, political, and musical, to set up this 21-minute encounter between a Yiddish-speaking Korean woman (soprano Erie Mills) and Mikhoels (baritone Nathaniel Watson) at a train station in Birobidzhan. A mythical figure of comfort and encouragement, the soprano concludes with a lullaby, which Mills delivers with both strength and delicacy, accompanied by Seattle’s masters of operatic orchestral work.
Elsewhere on this recording, there’s Adolphe’s song cycle “Out of the Whirlwind,” sung in Yiddish, based on Holocaust-related songs including “Es Brent” and “Ani Ma’amin.” It’s challenging, angry, and anxious music, with fine performances by mezzo-soprano Phyllis Pancella, tenor John Aler, and the College-Conservatory of Music Wind Symphony (of the University of Cincinnati) led by Rodney Winther. The CD opens with Adolphe’s “Ladino Songs of Love and Suffering,” where ancient Sephardic texts are joined to totally new music, in the intriguing, and beautifully-rendered combination of French horn (David Jolley), soprano (Lucy Shelton), and guitar (Eliot Fisk).