By Gigi Yellen-Kohn, JTNews Correspondent
In the season when both body and soul gear up for the High Holidays, we could use some inspiring music. Whether you’re preparing the New Year’s card mailing list, the shopping list, or the list of personal amends to make, it’s good to have audio company. Among the season’s best debuts on the Jewish music shelf here: big orchestral concert music, intimate chamber music, and a sampler of folk performers from around the world.
Sheila Silver:
Piano Concerto;
Six Preludes for Piano on Poems by Baudelaire
Alexander Paley, piano; Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra, Gintaras Rinkevicius, conductor (Naxos CD8.557015; www.naxos.com)
Silver, a Seattle native, writes big, dramatic orchestral music; from the pianist, she demands power and speed, but never at the expense of clarity. A passionate heir to Debussy and Tchaikovsky, this piano concerto has fired Silver’s imagination for a decade; the recording is well worth the wait. The prolific Silver has often used Hassidic melodies and Torah characters overtly in her work. While she alludes to Jewish prayer in her program notes to this piece, the lyrical theme dances more like a Spanish fantasy.
The 1990 preludes shimmer with the influence of the Mediterranean coast where they were composed. Paley introduced these six illustrative solo gems to enthusiastic Seattle audiences during a summer festival here nearly a decade ago; they were commissioned to accompany an exhibition of paintings inspired by the same poet. Detailed booklet notes by Cornish College Music Department chair Laura Kaminsky give the music and its accomplished composer the serious attention they deserve.
Dreaming: Songs of Lori Laitman
Jennifer Check, Sari Gruber, soprano; Patricia Green, mezzo-soprano; Randall Scarlata, William Sharp, baritone; Gary Karr, doublebass; Warren Jones, Lori Laitman, piano. (Albany CD Troy570; www.albanyrecords.com)
Among American contemporary composers, Laitman has distinguished herself as a writer of artsong — she is a sensitive ear tuned to the melodies a poem can carry, a translator of contemporary poetry into music for the accomplished concert singer. This album, a collection of songs for the intimate setting of solo voice with piano, includes the cycle “Holocaust 1944,” premiered on a Music of Remembrance concert in Seattle a couple of seasons ago.
Doublebass virtuoso Gary Karr repeats his success as an articulate interpreter of seven wrenching poems on Holocaust themes, joined here to great effect by baritone William Sharp. Heartily rooted in the musical legacy of Copland, Ives and Bernstein, Laitman employs an attractive variety of soloists and pianists in this collection of chamber pieces. She explores a wide spectrum of emotions in poems by Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Sara Teasdale, and William Carlos Williams, among others.
Texts are included in the notes. A sparkling finale, on a text by Laitman herself, celebrates the composer’s fantasy of receiving rave reviews. (Here’s one now!)
The Golden Dove: Masterpieces from the Jewish Folk Music Society.
Zina Schiff, violin; Cameron Grant, piano; Cherina Carmel, piano. (4Tay Inc. CD4022; www.ClassicalCDs.net)
The Jewish Folk Music Society was a short-lived but important force in early 20th-century Russian musical life. As a wave of artistic enthusiasm for ethnic and cultural roots swept this era, no less a light than Rimsky-Korsakov, the composer of “Sheherazade,” encouraged his Jewish students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory to engage themselves with their “native music.” Among those students were some of the composers presented here.
Although not a Jew himself, Rimsky-Korsakov, the earliest composer on this disc, wrote a “Hebrew Love Song.” Performed by Heifetz protégée Zina Schiff and produced by her daughter, Cherina Carmel — who also serves as pianist for her mother on two tracks — with longtime Schiff accompanist Cameron Grant, the pieces on this disc sing the classic sounds of Eastern Europe.
Certainly, they will thrill those who love minor key, cantorial-style violin music; meanwhile, notes by a specialist in the history of St. Petersburg Jews ensure that the listener appreciates the unique flowering of Russian creative work that this “folk” music inspired.
The Jewish Folk Music Society flourished during the 20 years that included the overthrow of the czar, pogroms, and the desperate emigration of many of its members.
Among these members, eight are included in this collection, on which Schiff’s eloquent violin transforms “Hebrew Melody” and “Chasidic Dance” and “Cradle Song” into exotic chamber music jewels.
The Hidden Gate:
Jewish Music From Around The World
Various artists; 2-disc set (Rounder Records 116 615 083-2; www.rounder.com)
You could spend an hour at the biggest CD store in town, hunting to see how many Jewish music bands from how many places you could find, or you could just indulge in this sampler, which offers contemporary practitioners of world Jewish music in two neat divisions.
On one disc, there’s “Israel and the Sephardic World”; on the other, the legacy of the Ashkenazim, namely, klezmer bands both old-style and new. These tracks—13 on each disc—represent people making music in our own time, from Israel’s late Ofra Haza and still-lively Chava Alberstein to The Rusape Jews of Zimbabwe.
Yair Dalal, the edgy Israeli with the worldbeat following who played Seattle a couple of years ago, is here, along with groups from Morocco, India, Uzbekistan and Brazil. Brazil is my favorite find: on the Sephardic side, there’s Fortuna, fronted by a gentle female voice, backed with gentle guitar and percussion, in a bounding rendition in Ladino of the Passover song “Who Knows One?”
Meanwhile, on the Ashkenazic side, there’s Banda Klezmer Brasil with a wonderful fusion they call “Freilach-Choro,” blending the rhythmic and harmonic complexities characteristic of their current home with classic klezmer clarinet riffs.
All the contemporary American biggies are here: Klezmer Conservatory Band, Kapelye, Brave Old World, the Klezmatics and their various spinoffs, as well as Klezmania from Australia. The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band from Canada gets to bring this whole festive event to a rousing world-uniting conclusion with “Alle Brider.”
The notes give a bit of historical background, but no translations. No matter. Like all good samplers, this one offers contact information for each band so you can follow up and find more of the ones you like best, as you marvel at the diversity of what’s called Jewish Music around the contemporary world.