Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

Historian Jenna Weissman Joselit of George Washington University reflects on last week’s concert:

Some members of the audience were drawn by the opportunity to see Kissin in person. Others were drawn by the program, which featured a number of works not usually part of his repertoire: sonatas and rhapsodies by Alexander Abramovich Krein, Mikhail Milner and Alexander Moiseveich Veprik, Russian Jewish composers of the interwar years whose compositions are known only to the cognoscenti. And still others came out that chilly wintry night warmed by the prospect of seeing and hearing one of the world’s leading musicians not play, but speak — and in Yiddish, no less.

Read the rest here.

This Thursday to Saturday (April 10-12) at the John F. Kennedy Center: Violinist Gil Shaham joins the National Symphony Orchestra and renowned conductor James Conlon to perform Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D major, as well as masterpieces by Brahms and Zemlinsky. See the event details here. Listen to Classical WETA’s Deborah Lamberton interview with Gil Shaham here.

The Vienna Philharmonic orchestra has revoked the medals it awarded to six high-ranking Nazis during Hitler’s rule. Founded in 1842, the orchestra began its annual New Year’s concert of Strauss waltzes in 1941 as a Nazi propaganda instrument. According to Vienna historian Oliver Rathkolb, there is evidence that the orchestra also planned to present a medal to Hitler himself. If this is the case, that medal would also be revoked.

Pro Musica Hebraica commissioned several translations of poetry by Chaim Nachman Bialik and Isaac Leybush Peretz for performance in Evgeny Kissin’s concert on February 24, 2014 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. They are published here for the first time.

For details on translators’ copyright or reproduction, please contact Pro Musica Hebraica.

Anne Midgette of The Washington Post previews tomorrow’s PMH concert:

Evgeny Kissin is widely known as one of the greatest living pianists, a superstar, and, like many big-league musicians, a citizen of the world. He is also known as a pianist of Russian Jewish extraction. He is hardly known at all as an Israeli, and for good reason. He took Israeli citizenship only last December.

And he is emphatically not known, outside a small circle, as someone who recites Yiddish poetry from memory, much less as someone who does it during his concerts. Yet that’s exactly what he’s going to do Monday night at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

Read the rest here.