Curator: Assaf Shelleg
The second concert is comprised of works for string orchestra, written between the 1930s and the 1970s. At once such focus enables one to better sense the compositional transformations in Israel in addition to composers’ aesthetic choices.
We begin with Sternberg’s 1935 Quodlibet, where he juggles with folk music and works composed in the 1920s — “Anu banu artza” (“We came to our land”), “Kuma Echa” (“Arise my brother”), “Lemoladeti” (“To my homeland”) — in addition to “Maoz Tzur”. Sternberg was a zealous modernist, especially in his chamber and solo works; at the same time, however, and like many other composers, he knew how to pair his writing with the ideological tension of the Yishuv, and accordingly complement that with the fitting dissonant level.
But Ben-Haim’s 1947 Concerto for Strings’ focus is utterly different. It joins his portraits of the East (which would become models for composers such as Avni or Sheriff, whom we heard in the first concert), with references to his Oratorio Joram, which he penned in 1933 in Munich (prior to emigrating to Palestine), and he does so through quotations that were known only to him at the time.
Both works, Sternberg’s Quodlibet and Ben-Haim Concerto for Strings, are a reminder of the immigration (rather, forced emigration) of Ben-Haim from Munich and Sternberg from Berlin, and of the fact that the music in Palestine and in Israel, as noted early, may be viewed as dislocated European music.
Psalms by Partos, the third work in this concert, is an arrangement of his Second String Quartet, written in 1960 and thickened into string orchestra format in 1970. While employing twelve-tone composition, the imagery that guided Partos were the shorter, motivic, and elastic formations of biblical tropes, but without necessarily drawing on a specific musical tradition.
Avni’s Prayer was written in 1961 and edited at the end that decade, following his studies in the US during the mid-1960s, and after writing for larger ensembles that consolidated the style and sound that characterize his music to this very day.
And so, while Sternberg plays with the Zionist musical signs, and Ben-Haim looks back to the music he wrote in Germany, national exoticism is abandoned in Partos and Avni’s works. It is abandoned in favor of abstract formulations and modern compositional techniques, while anticipating composers return to the Jewish musics Zionism sought to distinguish as religious or exilic.
Text: Assaf Shelleg
First Violin:
Dumitru Pocitari, Alexander Stark, Adelina Grodsky, Nitzan Canetty, Gilad Rivkin, Drorit Valk
Second Violin:
Ari Vilhjálmsson, Shmuel Glazer, Avital Steiner Tuneh, Hadar Cohen
Viola:
Miriam Hartman, Amir van der Hal, Vladislav Krasnov, Gili Radian-Sade
Cello:
Emanuele Silvestri, Enrique Maltz, Iakov Kashin
Bass:
Nir Comforty, Omri Weinberger
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Video Director: Yoel Culiner
Director of Photography: Dror Heller
Sound: Rafi Eshel, Yaron Aldema - Eshel Sound Studios
Creative Director: Elizabeth Culiner
Light Designer: Dani Rogovin
Production: Liz Fisher
Animation: Gavriel Izaky
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