Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

Reviewing The Cambridge History of Musical Performance in the Wall Street Journal, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim explores the meaning of “authentic” musical performances. Particularly amusing, however, was this bit of social history on musical audiences:

Modern concertgoers, forever fretful of marring a sublime performance with misplaced applause or a chirping cellphone, may be relieved to read in the book about a late 18th-century Viennese traveler who noted with astonishment that music audiences in northern Germany were “content with the pure enjoyment of the music, without wishing to have the pleasures of card playing, eating and drinking in addition. There you would think you showed both the music lovers and professional musicians a discourtesy and dishonored the music, if you rattled playing chips and hot chocolate cups throughout.”

You can read the rest of the review here.

Mezzo-soprano Margaret Mezzacappa was named one of five winners at this year’s Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions Grand Finals in New York. Her audition included selections from Gounod’s “Sappho” and Handel’s “Semele.” The New York Times has the story.

Mezzacappa made her Kennedy Center debut in Pro Musica Hebraica’s Spring 2010 concert, An Evening of French Jewish Music. The Washington Post lauded her “sympathetic attention to the poetry” in her performance of rare classics and newly discovered masterpieces.

 Tikva Records recently released a compilation of Jewish music from the 1950s and ’60s, feautring Leo Fuchs, Leo Fuld, Martha Schlamme, Mary Levitt, and many others. As one critic put it, the compilation “gives us this window into understanding what Jews were buying [and] what Jewish identity could sound like in all of its mixture and diversity.” You can learn more about it at Idelsohn Society’s website. The CD is available at Amazon.

In a book published in January of this year, David Conway of University College London explores “why and how Jews, virtually absent from Western art music until the end of the eighteenth century, came to be represented in all branches of the profession within fifty years as leading figures–not only as composers and performers, but as publishers, impresarios and critics.” Writing in the Forward, Benjamin Ivry explores Conway’s work by way of considering the lives of German composers Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, both of Jewish origin:

An unprecedented degree of public acceptance was required in order for German Jews to gain prominence in the quintessentially social role of composer. Wealth and societal standing were essential elements of this acceptance. Thus, when the 11-year-old Meyerbeer’s family had him pose for a formal oil portrait standing next to a piano, it was to place this child musical prodigy in the tradition of Mozart but also to underline his family’s social position. Unlike the young Mozart, however, Meyerbeer performed in public not to earn money but to make his family proud. He also made German Jews proud that one of their own could attain such prodigious artistry.

You can read the rest of Ivry’s article here. Conway’s book is available at Amazon.

Anne Midgette of the Washington Post reviews “The Enigma of Paris: Charles-Valentin Alkan, Frédéric Chopin and the French-Jewish Romance:”

Hamelin also did an outstanding job bringing across a lot of unfamiliar music to the audience. Alkan was once a star performer and later a recluse, long associated with the spurious but dramatic story that he died pulling the Talmud from a bookshelf that collapsed on him (Charles Krauthammer, the columnist who founded Pro Musica Hebraica with his wife, Robyn, said in his introduction from the stage that this accorded perfectly with his own impression of the Talmud, “beautiful but deadly”). His work is technically difficult and quintessentially romantic, making it an ideal vehicle for Hamelin, who certainly made a case for getting to know it better.

Read the whole thing.