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From the Shtetl to the Spiritual New York
Good Shepherd Church
10/07/2024 -
Joel Engel: Freilechs Dance
Aleksandr Krein: Esquisses hébraïques
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Aria, Op. 9;
Sergei Prokofiev: Overture on Hebrew Themes, Op. 34
Leo Ornstein: Piano Quintet, Op. 92
Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players: Vadim Lando (Clarinet), Claire Bourg, Isabelle Ai Durrenberger (Violins), Maurcey Banazek (Viola), Christine Lamprea (Cello), Fei-Fei (Pianist)
C. Bourg/V. Lando(© Courtesy of the Artists)
“The ‘Quintette’ (sic) is not a polite piece... it may be overcharged but it is what I heard. Possibly it might have been less blunt and emotionally more reserved, but if one does not sense its almost brutal emotional directness, then I have indeed failed. Maintaining its emotional power forced me to sacrifice a greater unity I might otherwise have achieved, but any attempt to modify it destroyed whatever was genuine.”
Leo Ornstein on today’s Piano Quintet
“The whole world is nothing more than a singing and a dancing before the Holy One, blessed be He. Every Jew is a singer before Him, and every letter in the Torah is a musical note.”
Poet Naphtali Herz (1854-1909)
It was neither Rosh Hashanah or forthcoming Yom Kippur or the now dreadful date of October 7th. Simply, this afternoon’s Jupiter Chamber Orchestra was a typical singular selection unlike any other ensemble.
In this case the program encompassed Jewish music. Two Russian-Jewish composers, one Polish-Russian-Jewish composer, one Russian-Jewish-American composer. And one gentile (Russian Orthodox) Russian composer.
All five of the composers were given first‑class treatment by the seven musicians listed above. That quintet of composers each had a different message to offer. Yet to be honest, they could be easily divided into Provincial and Cosmopolitan.
On that Provincial side, the pair of writers who unashamedly used the well‑known shtetl‑Sephardic scale and bumptious rhythms was first a trio by Joel Engel, with the kind of dance that would have influenced Fiddler on the Roof with a rollicking set of melodies played by violinist Claire Bourg.
The second shtetl number, by Alexander Krein, had strings and piano and the archetypal klezmer instrument, Vadim Lando’s clarinet.The first half was oh-so-Jewish–in technical terms, a geeky Phrygian mode. The second was whiplash dance, a combination of Whirling Dervish and tarantella.
Listening to both, I realized that this was not Middle Eastern. Nothing at all Arabic. Instead the music was echt‑Turkish, the phrasing and scales from Tashkent and Turkmenistan. A nice revelation.
Now the Cosmopolitan composers. Those who played with those scales, morphing them into original creations. The simplest was by Prokofiev, and while the composer didn’t think highly of the Overture on Hebrew Themes, and while the Hebrew themes were ersatz, the combination of piano, string quartet and clarinet was short and festive enough.
And now a confession. Frequently I have told musicians that the most mesmeric 16 measures of the 20th Century were the opening bars of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s First Cello Concerto. With deep friend and spiritual collaborator with Shostakovich, Weinberg produced some of the finest Russian music extant.
Now I’ve changed my choice of great measures. The five minutes of Weinberg’s Aria for string quartet are haunting, lyrical, not emotional like Barber’s piece, but with an inner trauma, a feeling a haunting dream, over far far too early.
I. A. Durrenberger/Fei-Fei (© Courtesy of the Artists)
The second half was devoted to Leo Ornstein’s hour‑long Piano Quintet. An hour of ferocity, dissonance, almost impossible piano measures, here faultlessly played by Fei‑Fei.
And who was Leo Ornstein? His story–trained in Russia, a dynamic pianist, atonal then simply dissonant, successful in New York–and then disappearing and found alone, a hermit in the woods of Texas, still composing.
I had never heard this Quintet, yet each of the three movements imprisoned me in its daring, its originality, its intensity. Here, were measures of sweeping dissonance, tempered with banal tunes peeping out from the middle. Here, as the two violins played sweetly, the whole piece turned into a thunderstorm, while a saccharine Rachmaninoff measure scurried under the thunder like agoutis scrambling through the forest.
Briefly, each moment of this Jupiter offering had an excitement all its own. And yes, I well understand how the Zionists have tried to extricate themselves from those terrible days of pogroms and mass murders.
The Israelis have succeeded all too well, But listening to these works, one realizes that art can sing and paint even the most traumatic history for eternity.
Harry Rolnick
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