Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

The Munich-based newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, reviews ARC Ensemble’s recent performance at the Dachau Castle Concert.

[The Ben-Haim Piano Quartet] belongs on the Dachau Castle Concert podium. How nice that it was able to make the leap into live performance as part of this thematically ambitious and very demanding concert. It is the ARC Ensemble’s hope that these sublime works, works that transcend their own time and place, find their way into the concert hall, and that they join ‘the canon of 20th century masterworks’. The ensemble achieved this goal on Saturday night. And through this, Dachau became a musical place of learning.

Since 2008, Pro Musica Hebraica has proudly collaborated with the ARC Ensemble, the ensemble-in-residence of Canada’s Royal Conservatory of Music, in three concerts devoted to bringing forgotten Jewish music to the concert hall. Read more about them at the links below.

• Fall 2008: Lost and Found: Jewish Musical Treasures from Eastern Europe
• Fall 2010: War and Exile: The Music of Berman, Braunfels, and Ben-Haim
• Spring 2015: Before The Night: Jewish Classical Masterpieces of Pre–1933 Europe

From the New York Times:

“Di Goldene Kale,” a Yiddish-language operetta from the 1920s that was lost to time, will soon receive its first full staging in nearly 70 years.

The show, put on by the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene as part of its fall season and a residency with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, will run from Dec. 2 through 27.

“Di Goldene Kale” — with music by Joseph Rumshinsky, lyrics by Louis Gilrod and a book by Frieda Freiman — had its premiere in 1923 at Kessler’s Second Avenue Theater, where it filled the 2,000-seat house and ran for 18 weeks.

Read the rest.

The online magazine Mosaic recently featured a symposium on Wagner’s music that included an essay by composer Nathan Shields and responses by PMH Resident Scholar James Loeffler, among others:

Essay

• Nathan Shields: Wagner and the Jews: Two centuries after the great composer’s birth, his anti-Semitism remains a bitterly contested issue. Perhaps that’s because no one has yet come to grips with its, or his, true nature.

Responses

• Edward Rothstein: Something More than Profound Prejudice: As Wagner illustrates, anti-Semitism is more than a mere dislike of Jews—it’s a metaphysical condition that shapes the very way the world is perceived.
• Terry Teachout: “Going Under” in Europe: Wagner’s totalizing anti-Judaism is still alive. It just has a new face, fully revealed in this month’s attacks in Paris.
• James Loeffler: Wagner’s Jewish Problem: Hating Wagner is a debilitating Jewish habit. So is loving him.

Rejoinder

• Nathan Shields: Courting Oblivion: More insidious than Wagner’s hateful ideas are his passions, which reside in his music and stir answering passions in others.

Michael Haas contextualizes the life and music of Korngold:

There is much that speaks for Korngold being hailed as ‘the father of the Hollywood Sound’ – but there is also a good deal of hyperbole connected with this observation. Fellow Viennese Max Steiner was certainly the progenitor of the dedicated Hollywood score, and other composers – both immigrant and American-born, developed ideas that resulted in the cumulative ‘Sound’ that defined the sweep of Hollywood films from the 1930s onwards. Korngold’s contribution is perhaps symbolic as much as anything. Until his arrival, no serious composer had shown an interest in American cinema.

Read the rest on Haas’ Forbidden music blog.