Spring preview — Classical: Concert highlights for 2012
Secret tip: Marc-Andre Hamelin’s last recital in Washington was one of my favorite concerts in 2011. He returns this spring for an intriguing recital exploring the music of France’s two most successful 19th-century pianist-composers, Chopin and Alkan, and the reason why one is remembered and the other is virtually forgotten. Presented by Pro Musica Hebraica in the Kennedy Center’s diminutive Terrace Theater, the event is almost sure to sell out. April 2 at 7:30 p.m.Continue Reading
Pianist Jascha Nemtsov plays folk-influenced music by Jewish composers
While Schoenberg and his like-minded musical thinkers were deconstructing tonality in the 1920s and ’30s, other composers (Kodaly and Bartok, to name just two) were rediscovering and reveling in the folk music of their respective homelands — and Bartok had feet in both worlds. On Thursday — under the sponsorship of Charles Krauthammer’s organization, the Pro Musica Hebraica — pianist Jascha Nemtsov, joined by cellist Julian Arp, violinist Frank Reinecke and clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, offered a well-researched program of folk-influenced music by little-known Jewish composers of that inter-war period at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. Continue Reading
Pro Musica Hebraica: Vivid delight and distress
Czech composer Karel Berman survived internments at Auschwitz, Dachau and Theresienstadt, as well as a bout of typhoid and a Nazi death march, before restarting his life and enjoying a half-century of composing and singing leading roles for the Prague National Theatre Opera. But to hear the richly sung and vividly characterized performance that bass Robert Pomakov and pianist Dianne Werner gave Berman's spiky, often playful, Czech-language song-cycle, "Poupata" ("Birds"), at a Pro Musica Hebraica-sponsored recital at the Terrace Theater on Thursday, it's hard to imagine such a life-affirming score was written during the darkest days of the composer's imprisonment. Continue Reading
Pro Musica Hebraica presents the Biava Quartet
In the three years since its founding, Pro Musica Hebraica, an organization dedicated to bringing neglected Jewish music to the concert hall, has produced two concerts a year of uncommon interest. Thursday’s program, in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, featured the Biava Quartet and the music they played, all French and most of it from the first half of the 20th century, offered a mix of French instrumental color and Jewish earthiness in proportions that varied from piece to piece but that served each composer well. Continue Reading
Pro Musica Hebraica "highlight[s] an overlooked aspect of Jewish culture"
Charles Krauthammer's office in Washington does not lack for artifacts. He obviously cherishes the snapshot of himself with a laughing Ronald Reagan and the board where he plays chess with Natan Sharansky. But the room's centerpiece is the sepia photograph of a serious-looking man in a fur hat. He was a chief rabbi of Krakow—and Mr. Krauthammer's great-great-grandfather. Mr. Krauthammer is not a believer, but the affinity across the generations is strong. "I consider myself a Shinto Jew," he tells me. "I engage in ancestor worship." Continue Reading
Apollo Ensemble's riffs bring out fun in violinist's sonatas
In many ways, Salamone Rossi's life bridged two worlds. A Jewish composer who lived in Mantua at the turn of the 18th century, he wrote music for the synagogue that was comfortably in the idiom of high Renaissance church music and secular pieces that were unmistakably Baroque. (The great musicologist Gustave Reese has noted that in his sacred motets the music ran as usual from left to right, but the Hebrew text under them ran from right to left -- undoubtedly a challenge for the singers). Continue Reading
Preserver of Jewish music
Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist who quit a job as the chief resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1970s to find work sharing his views with a global audience (his op-eds are carried in The Jerusalem Post among other publications), does not want to talk about himself or his political opinions. Instead, the 59-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner wants to discuss the music program he and his wife recently started to try to revive and preserve Jewish music that has been lost to the masses. "Pro Musica Hebraica," as it's called, just finished its first season to critical acclaim, and Krauthammer is looking to raise awareness about the project as it gears up for its second year. Continue Reading
The Biava Quartet at the Kennedy Center
Shostakovich's music opened the Pro Musica Hebraica-sponsored recital by the Biava Quartet at the Terrace Theater on Thursday. It was his Fourth String Quartet, infused with Russian-Jewish folk music and a notably gentler score than some of his other, anguished works in that form. The other four composers on the program, however, were names few listeners today would know. Continue Reading
Pro Musica Hebraica, The Biava Quartet
In a city bracing for seemingly inevitable cultural cut-backs, suspensions and extinctions, the audacity of sustaining the emergence of an entirely new musical organization must be applauded. The Baltimore Opera Company has moved into liquidation, and Washington's Master Chorale plans to suspend operations. But Charles Krauthammer and his wife Robyn Krauthammer have boldly created Pro Musica Hebraica to perform and "recover" Jewish classical music. Continue Reading
Pro Musica Hebraica performs 'lost' Jewish works
For all of its celebrated universality, the language of music speaks with many different accents. A century ago, a group of Russian composers set out to explore one such accent by forming the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg, with the encouragement of such luminaries as Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Continue Reading
Reviving virtually unknown Jewish music is couple's labor of love
Some would say that Robyn and Charles Krauthammer do too much, but that's clearly not the Chevy Chase couple's perspective. "We have made it a point in life to do things we really love... Work done in that spirit is not burdensome. It's actually enjoyable," explains Robyn Krauthammer on behalf of the duo that has found time amid impressive and non-musical professional careers to create Pro Musica Hebraica (PMH), an organization that brings lost and rarely performed works of Jewish art music to contemporary audiences. Continue Reading
New Life for Lost Jewish Music
It was Robyn Krauthammer who came up with the idea for what was to become Pro Musica Hebraica - a project to revive forgotten Jewish classical music from a century ago. A lawyer turned painter and sculptor, Robyn converted to Judaism before her marriage to Charles Krauthammer, the influential conservative columnist. "She is more Jewish than I am," Charles says, smiling at his wife. "She has a real love and feeling for it." Continue Reading
ARC, Peering Into the Shadows
In 1941, a Polish musical genius fled his country for the hills of Uzbekistan. There in Tashkent, Mieczyslaw (or Moisey) Weinberg began churning out the first of his 22 symphonies and 17 string quartets. Given that Weinberg never fared well with the Stalinists, few pieces received significant premieres. "What was performed," he would later say of his music, "was performed due to a performer's express desire." Continue Reading
Breathing New Life Into Lost Jewish Music
Pro Musica Hebraica, a concert series dedicated to exploring lost Jewish music, had a successful inaugural concert on Thursday evening at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. Jewish music can mean a lot of things, and the program smartly centered on a group of self-defined Jewish composers from 1908 St. Petersburg. Youthful Juilliard School ensembles and violin luminary Itzhak Perlman gave wonderfully prepared and vibrant performances of each score, most of which have likely not been heard in more than half a century. Continue Reading
All Arts Review
Pro Musica Hebraica presented the ARC Ensemble (Artists of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Canada) in a unique evening of 20th century Jewish Soviet music. The event, chaired by Charles Kauthhammer, was an opportunity to hear rare pieces performed perfectly by an outstanding ensemble of chamber musicians. Continue Reading
Charles and Robyn Krauthammer Announce PRO MUSICA HEBRAICA A Non-Profit Organization Dedicated to Presenting Jewish Music
(Washington, DC) -- Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer and his wife, artist Robyn Krauthammer, announced today the establishment of Pro Musica Hebraica, a new non-profit organization dedicated to presenting and exploring the wide-range and tradition of Jewish music. The inaugural concert will be presented at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Thursday, April 10 at 7:30pm, featuring musicians of the Julliard School and guest soloist Itzhak Perlman and his long-time musical collaborator, pianist Rohan De Silva. Continue Reading