Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

PMH adviser and UVA professor James Loeffler writes a strong and important counterweight to the musical vogue that defines Jewish composers only by their status as Hitler’s victims:

Now, by labeling certain works of art as “Holocaust music,” we risk creating a genre that turns the details of history and the complex meanings of music into one saccharine lesson in universalist tolerance. It may sound like heresy to criticize a pious act of Holocaust remembrance. But the true heresy is to turn Jewish composers into shadow images defined only by their status as Hitler’s victims.

Read the rest of Loeffler’s excellent piece at Tablet Magazine.

For more on this topic, see Simon Wynberg’s Commentary essay about the hijacking of Terezín and Verdi’s Requiem. 

In The Washington Examiner, Emily Cary talks with Violinist David Rabinovich of the Apollo Ensemble about the discovery of several works in the Amsterdam’s Ets-Chaim Library and their reconstruction by Ton Koopman, founder of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra:

“We look forward to playing at the Kennedy Center again,” he said. “It’s an amazing venue and the response of the audience was wonderful. They loved several works we played at that time by the Italian composer [Salamon] Rossi, so we will play two sonatas that he wrote for the court about 1622, possibly for a wedding ceremony. They are performed by two violins, cello and harpsichord, a very popular combination at that time. He was one of the founders of the baroque genre and his work is a transition between the late Italian Renaissance and early baroque. Although he was Jewish, he changed his name, as many did at that time.”

Read the rest here.

Professor Jenna Weissman Joselit of George Washington University reflects on last week’s concert, Jewish Baroque Treasures from Italy and Amsterdam:

Last Monday night, May 13th, the Apollo Ensemble performed at the Kennedy Center, bringing this member of the audience to tears more than once. The group’s bravura musicianship had something to do with my heightened emotional state, as did the beauty of the music. Digital projections of the musical compositions, some bearing the cameo-like stamp of the Etz-Hayim Library, also tugged at my heart-strings, while the incisive program notes composed by Professor James Loeffler of the University of Virginia made me want to learn more.

But what really struck me — and hard — was the sense that this particular concert was itself a composition of layers, whose structure was built on the multiple strands that make up the Jewish experience: Creative energy, loss, rediscovery, preservation, translation, reinterpretation and the prospect of renewal.

Read the rest here.

On Monday, May 6th, at 9PM (EST), Washington DC’s WETA 90.9 FM will broadcast our Fall 2012 concert, Between Two Worlds: Jewish Voices in Modern European Music.

Wherever you are, can also listen live on WETA’s website by clicking here.

Don’t miss what the Washington Post called “a blazing, larger-than-life performance that seemed to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit, even from the depths of chaos.”

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Michael Haas, research director of the Jewish Music Institute for Suppressed Music (SOAS, University of London), has written a book on “Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century.” The book, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis, will be released by Yale University Press on May 13.