Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

The UCLA Philharmonia’s  first CD pays tribute to Eric Zeisl, an important but under-recognized Vienna-born Jewish composer who fled to Paris in 1938 ahead of the Nazi invasion. The CD features world-premiere recordings of three of the composer’s orchestral works: “Little Symphony after Pictures of Roswitha Bitterlich,” “November: Six Sketches for Chamber Orchestra” and “Concerto Grosso for Cello and Orchestra,” with internationally renowned cellist and UCLA professor Antonio Lysy as soloist. Director of UCLA Philharmonia Neal Stulberg explained that the decision to focus on Zeisl was “to give the students an invaluable educational experience while sharing high-quality but neglected music with the public.” For more on this release and to listen to clips, visit the UCLA Today website.

Over the years, Pro Musica Hebraica has received many requests for assistance in locating sheet music by the composers we’ve featured in our concert series. Our goal has always been to make this music more accessible to performing artists, educators and scholars, and the general public. For that reason we are happy to provide a list of resources for individuals and organizations interested in acquiring their own copies of this music for performance or study. The list is not exhaustive, but includes major online digital collections and major library repositories with significant collections available for borrowing and duplication. We will update this list periodically and we always welcome additional suggestions. You can find our “Resources for Performers and Educators” permanently under “The Musical Tradition” tab on our top website menu, or by and clicking here.

UPDATE (10/22/2013): We’ve added a new section on printed score collections, as well as another resource for online digital collections.

Hungarian conductor and composer Iván Fischer of the Budapest Festival Orchestra has composed an opera aimed at fighting the growing hatred of Jews in today’s Hungary. The New York Times reports:

Based on an infamous 19th-century case in which a group of Jews were wrongly accused in the death of a Hungarian peasant girl, Mr. Fischer’s opera, “The Red Heifer,” is a vivid display of how cultural figures have emerged as some of the most vocal critics of Hungary’s rightward and authoritarian drift under Prime Minister Viktor Orban….

“The Red Heifer” is based on a blood libel from 1882 that divided the country much as the Dreyfus affair later did in France. His ambitious composition uses both a full orchestra and a Gypsy band, with references to music from Klezmer to rap to Mozart….

“Culture shouldn’t be interested in day-to-day politics,” said Mr. Fischer, who has also been the principal conductor of the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. “We want to be valid next year and the year after. But I think culture has a strong responsibility to find the essence, the real concealed truth which lies behind the day to day.”

Read the rest here.

Yale University Press has just issued Professor James Loeffler‘s The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire in paperback. This book tells the forgotten story of the composers whose pioneering efforts to compose Jewish classical music inspired the creation of Pro Musica Hebraica. The Most Musical Nation won the ASCAP Bela Bartok Prize as one of the best music books of 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Click here to purchase a copy and read it for yourself.

And if you’re in the DC area, be sure to catch Loeffler at the Jewish Literary Festival on October 13 at Washington DCJCC. More details here.

Opera Nostalgia just uploaded several rare Jewish recordings to their YouTube channel. Among them is the the 1982 live recording from the finale of Lodovico Rocca’s three-act opera, Il Dibuk:

For more on the composer and the opera, see the accompanying text under the clip on the YouTube page.