Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

The Russian-born violinist Joseph Achron (1886-1943) earned an early reputation as a child prodigy and later found world fame as a concert soloist. Less appreciated is that he was also “one of the greatest composers of the early 20th century.” One of Achron’s string quartet works received its modern premiere at Pro Musica Hebraica’s Spring 2009 concert (you can listen here), but many of them have never even been published. Now thanks to a grant by Pro Musica Hebraica, the Joseph Achron Society will soon publish Achron’s Complete String Quartets. These works include Chromatic String Quartet, Op. 26; Elegy in Memory of Joel Engel, Op. 62; Sinfonietta; and Four Improvisations. The 4-volume edition will also feature half a dozen transcriptions of Achron’s earlier works: the jovial Scher, Op. 42; a soulful Stimmung, Op. 32 No. 1; the Mi Chomocho from his Friday Evening Service; incidental music to the Yiddish play The Dawn, as well as newly commissioned scholarship on each individual work. To receive updates, sign up for Joseph Achron Society’s newsletter.

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.