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CHAMBER ORCHESTRA REVIEW
Rainbow of Jewish Music October 28, 2001
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By Dan Leeson
Sunday afternoon on Stanford University's Lively Arts series, Daniel Heifetz, violinist, narrator, and designer of unusual and dramatic concert programs presented a mostly entertaining afternoon called, "Voice of a People: The Jewish Soul, Journey of the American Jew." The first three-quarters of the concert was extremely effective and highly emotional. However, due to his choice of selections for the concert's conclusion, the ending was awkward and abrasive.
Backed up by a group called "The Classical Band" (an ensemble that Heifetz organized and manages, not the early-music orchestra of the same name) and with the splendid singing of soprano Carmen Balthrop, the afternoon was intended to be a Jewish experience. Mostly it achieved that end, reflected in the palpable excitement the audience displayed on multiple occasions. Heifetz is a splendid and intelligent musician with ample panache and temperament. He is also an exceptional performer as demonstrated by his delicate and idiomatic work with folk songs, a form whose need for simplicity makes them as difficult to bring off as a concerto.
Giving ample opportunities to his band members, Heifetz put the cellist Lukasz Szyrner stage center to give a magnificent performance of the Kol Nidrei in a small-scale arrangement of Max Bruch's large-scale form. Szyner was so musical that the reduced orchestral resources were hardly missed. A performance of Yehudi Wyner's V'hakohanim for violin and piano was intelligently done by violinist Janice Martin and pianist Micah Yui. Martin also played the tambourine in Meira Warshauer's arrangement for the Classical Band of several Yiddish songs. Warshauer was in the audience, having flown in from South Carolina to hear her interesting composition for solo violin, Bracha, open the concert in another effective performance by Heifetz.
Carmen Balthrop showed her versatility by singing several songs memorializing the Holocaust ("Close Your Little Eyes," "Kaddish," and "Never Say") all in both Yiddish and English. These are quite unlike the more traditional songs Balthrop sang elsewhere on the program -- "Raisins and Almonds," and "On the Hearth A Fire Burns," also sung in Yiddish and English. Other music composed in response to the Holocaust included a remarkable movement from the Trio in E minor, Op. 67, No. 2 for violin, cello, and piano by Shostakovich. What made the material extraordinary was the composer's scoring in which the strings use mutes towards the end of the movement, but do so at the loudest possible dynamic, a seeming contradiction of musical ideas. The result was that the instrumentalists sounded as if they were being strangled, exactly Shostakovich's intentions so as to convey the hideous realities of the Holocaust. There was no skimping on talent anywhere in Heifetz' Classical Band. They were all excellent players. In addition to Szyner, Martin, and Yui there were violinist Tao (no other name given), Myron Makris, viola, and Christopher Chlumsky, bass. As lead violinist for the group, Tao demonstrated a keen and unexplainable affinity for klezmer performance practices.
If Heifetz' intentions were to give a panorama of Jewish music, he succeeded quite well up to the final three selections of the concert. He had a sample of traditional material, liturgical music, European and American associations, and music with a very much Jewish flavor written by non-Jews, such as the Bruch Kol Nidrei and the Shostakovich trio. But when the concert's ending was designed, very weak programming decisions were made in the choice of three songs from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The Jewish connection was forced and awkward, not enough simply because Gershwin was Jewish composer. One needs a more specific reason to include a work on such a program, reasons that had been clear and unambiguous for the first three-quarters of the presentation. Heifetz suggested that the aria "My Man's Gone Now," and the satirical "It Ain't Necessarily So" had Jewish liturgical connections through a very strained and unconvincing affinity with synagogue chant. The inclusion of "Bess You Is My Woman Now" was an even more unfortunate choice for two reasons, one dramatic, the other musical. First, Heifetz, playing the musical line of Porgy, did the duet on his knees, simulating Porgy's crippled condition, while soprano Balthrop made dramatic gestures to him as she walked around. Taken out of the context of the opera, the staging was heavy-handed and embarrassing. Second, the acoustic requirements of the duet mandate that the solo voices be spaced two octaves apart for proper voicing, something not possible between violin and a soprano. As an encore, we heard "Summertime," where again Heifetz argued that the work — according to Gershwin — had characteristics of a Jewish lullaby. The metaphor was equally awkward. Had Heifetz wanted a bang-up ending to his concert (which is probably why he chose the oft-played, oft-sung Gershwin numbers), he would have been better served with an arrangement of one movement from Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony. That would have been very much in tune with his otherwise clever programming, in that it allows a narrator to have a monologue with God, reminding the Almighty about the rainbow that was put in the sky as a remembrance of his eternal promise. Furthermore, that would have gotten Heifetz off his knees, though it must be said that even in that position, he still plays well. (Musicologist/author Dan Leeson is a former member of the San Jose Symphony Orchestra, a retired businessman, and an editor of the 220-volume complete Mozart edition published by Bärenreiter.) ©2001 Dan Leeson, all rights reserved |
