Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

On February 1, the Israeli Chamber Project will play at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Here is the program:
Continue Reading »

The Washington Post‘s music critic, Anne Midgette, previews Pro Musica Hebraica’s Spring 2012 concert:

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.

You can purchase tickets from the Kennedy Center here.

Simon Wynberg, the artistic director of Canada’s ARC Ensemble — which performed in Pro Musica Hebraica’s Fall 2008 and Fall 2010 concerts — writes about music under Hitler:

[B]y the end of the war it was impossible to claim that art-music was intrinsically improving or ennobling. Although it might have soothed a mass-murderer’s savage breast, it had also steadied his gun. And if this realization encouraged a more mechanistic, less spiritual appraisal of music’s power, it also raised the possibility that music itself had betrayed society.

To read more, click here.

Montserrat Figueras, the Catalan early music soprano, died November 23 at her home in Bellaterra, Spain. She was 69.
Continue Reading »

One of the fascinating aspects of Jewish music in the Italian Renaissance is the fact that just as Jewish composers such as Salamone De Rossi brought the music of the church to the synagogue, Christian composers such as Benedetto Giacomo Marcello brought the synagogue to the church. The Venetian-born Marcello (1686-1739) led a dual career as a well-known aristocratic politician and noted composer of Italian church music. In his masterpiece, Estro poetico-armonico (1724-1727), a setting of the first fifty Psalms for voices, figured bass, and various instrumental soloists, he drew directly on contemporary Jewish religious music for inspiration. In search of traces of the lost music of antiquity, he turned to the Venetian Jewish community, transcribing and setting some 11 Hebrew melodies from the Tedesco tradition (Italian Jews of Ashkenazi descent), that he believed derived from the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. In his score, he carefully printed them from right to left to follow the logic of the Hebrew language.
Continue Reading »