International Bloch Conference, 29-31 July 2007
Chamber Recital in the Chapel of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
8 pm Sunday 29 July 2007
Programme
Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) – Poems of the Sea
1 Waves (Poco agitato) 2 Chanty (Andante misterioso) 3 At Sea (Allegro vivo)
Miriam Brickman, piano
Bloch - Poèmes d'Automne
1. La Vagabonde 2. Le Déclin 3. L'Abri 4. Invocation.
Whereas Bloch’s great choral work Avodath Hakodesh (‘The Sacred Service’) receives fairly regular performance, it is hard to explain why his exquisite solo songs are heard so rarely. Apart from eight student essays in the medium, Bloch’s mature songs fall into three groups chronologically. The first two, Historiettes au Crepuscule and Poèmes D’Automne, are cycles of four songs each; the last consists of three psalms. All are early works, composed in Europe before the composer’s first visit to the USA in 1916. Historiettes au Crepuscule was Bloch’s first published work, appearing in Paris in 1904. Two years later Bloch completed Poèmes D’Automne, settings of texts by Beatrice Rodes. More sophisticated individual and extended than Historiettes, this cycle reveals a deeper response to the melancholy and religious fervour of French Romantic poetry. The cycle points forward in style to the seven large scale works of the Jewish Cycle (1911-18), which include the third group of songs, the Deux Psaumes (137 et 114) and Psaume 22.
Andrea Rivers, soprano, with Zacharia Plavin, piano
Interval
Bloch - From Jewish Life for cello and piano (1924)
I Prayer II Supplication III Jewish Song
From Jewish Life for cello and piano (1924) date from the period immediately following his Jewish cycle and when he was Director of the Cleveland Institute of Music. It was dedicated to Hans Kindler who premiered Schelomo at Carnegie Hall in 1917, and indeed, in contrast to the Concerto Grosso no 1 also composed in 1924, the work retrieves the mood of the Jewish cycle. Yet rather than express themes and topics related to a Biblical past, here the influence of the Hassidic life of the ‘shtetl’ and Eastern Europe is most evident, with a seriousness and fervour redolent of cantorial improvisatory rhapsodizing.
The beauty of Bloch’s aesthetic in the From Jewish Life for cello and piano (1924) is largely result of both his use of modality and leitmotif technique. As Alex Knapp has discovered, Bloch makes use of the Jewish liturgical modes, notably the ‘Ahava Raba’ mode which features in the coda of the first piece, and which recurs in all three pieces. In each piece a motif is transformed through repetition, sequence and varied textures, to articulate a similar emotional journey, one of striving, of struggle and of resolution to a calm if not always certain, conclusion.
‘Prayer’ displays a masterly balance of formal symmetry, even simplicity and passionate emotional intensity. It is a type of variation form in which the initial theme recurs in two outer sections, each of which reaches a climax, and cadences on the tonic with a contrasting section featuring a new terse cello motif over a lighter airy piano texture, which then explodes into a new impassioned outpouring, a falling scale from the highest register that leads to a calm cadence. Finally the cello takes the theme up to the highest octave, with richly textured piano chords and counterpoints, transfigured from its earlier hushed nature into a forthright theme that is extended by a rhapsodizing coda, which comes finally to rest not on the fifth degree of the mode, effecting gentle, humble, even open-ended conclusion.
‘Supplication’ is infused with a passionate impetus, evident both in the pulsating piano texture and in the cello’s initial rising theme, that accelerates and is immediately repeated in a higher, inverted variant, that expands to a deep bass cadence. The theme undergoes expressive transformations, especially when repeated an octave higher, bringing the cello’s high singing tone to the fore, but the answering phrase is ingeniously repeated not higher, but lower in the extreme bass. An improvisatory transition ensues in which the turn motif from the end of the cello’s theme is then developed over piano tremolandi, with an impassioned climax as the piano’s voice is now heard alongside the cello, its lyrical theme sliding down to the answering theme in the bass, linking to a recapitulation of the opening. However this reprise soon develops again towards a second, even more powerful climax, that initiates a chromatic descent and return to the initial theme again this time of a syncopated piano pedal point, leading to a magical delicate ending in the light upper register.
The ‘Jewish Song’ has a three part design based on the transformations of a tiny three-note motif that is at the same time chirpy yet plaintive. At first it appears in the cello, expanded into a folkish melody over the piano’s simple drone, open fifths. Ornamented with characteristic semitone grace notes, the motif appears to evoke a Klezmer style. When the chirpy phrase reaches down to a pause in the bass, the piano picks it up while the cello now comments with a variant in the lowest register, soon rising and presenting a yearning new counter-theme that reaches climax of intensity. The ending is simple yet elusive: the texture reverses with the motif in the cello answered in the piano’s bass, this time closing on a rising, rather than falling phrase.
Bloch - ‘Nigun’ from Baal Shem - violin and piano (1923) transcribed for cello
Bloch composed his Baal Shem Suite: Three Pictures of Chassidic Lifein 1923. The work, dedicated to the memory of his mother Sophie who had died two years earlier, was inspired by two charismatic personalities: First of all, Israel ben Eliezer of Miedziboz, Poland (c.1698-c.1759), better known as Israel Baal Shem Tov (Heb. “Master of the Good Name”), the founder of modern Hassidism. This was a mystical movement that arose in Eastern Europe as a reaction against the perceived Rabbinical intellectualism of traditional Jewish Orthodoxy in the 18th century, and which placed great emphasis upon song, dance and ecstasy as channels for direct communication with God. Although Bloch came from a Western European Jewish background, he was deeply moved by a Hassidic Sabbath service that he had been invited to attend on New York’s Lower East Side in 1918. This was to have far-reaching effects on his direction as a composer... His second source of inspiration was the celebrated Swiss violinist André de Ribaupierre (1893-1955), who - during the gestation period of the Suite - visited the Cleveland Institute of Music, which Bloch had founded in 1920 and which he directed until his move to the San Francisco Conservatoire in 1925. Ribaupierre gave the first public performance of the complete Suite at a concert organized by the “Council of Jewish Women” at Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Cleveland on 6 February 1924. (An orchestral version was produced by the composer in 1939.)
The first movement, entitled Vidui (“Contrition”), was originally named “Meditation”. It is a wordless prayer of repentance, concluding with a typical cadence in the traditional Eastern Ashkenazi Ahava Rabba mode, known more colloquially as Freigish.
The centrepiece of the Suite is probably the best known among Bloch’s compositions for violin and piano and has retained its place in the standard repertoire as a self-standing solo work. The composer originally called this movement “Rhapsody”, but changed its name to Nigun (“Improvisation”). This Hebrew and Yiddish word means, literally, “tune”; but in the Hassidic context it refers to a genre of songs, usually composed by tzaddikim (“holy men”, “saints”), the purpose of which is to transport both performer and listener to transcendental realms of spirituality. Niggunim (pl.) could be either metrical or non-metrical, and they were usually set to non-semantic syllables (e.g. ya-ba-ba at a slow pace, or biri-biri-bim-bom at a fast tempo). Although in this movement Bloch appears not to have quoted directly or intentionally from Jewish sources, the opening violin motif is identical to a phrase from Ashkenazi biblical cantillation; and one of the prominent melodies in the middle section bears a remarkable resemblance to Vos ost du mit opgeton (“What have you done to me?”), a traditional Yiddish folksong (Frejlexs) quoted in Moshe Beregovsky’s Yevreiskiye Narodniye Pesny (“Jewish Folk Songs”, Moscow, 1962).
The last movement, named after the Festival of Simchas Torah (“Rejoicing in the Law”). In the middle of this lively finale, Bloch has deliberately introduced the opening motifs of the popular Yiddish song Di Mezhinke Oisgegaybn (“The Youngest Daughter Married Off”) by the Polish composer Mark Warshavsky (1848-1907), tossed back and forth between violin and piano. All three movements reveal traits typical of Bloch’s music of the 1920s: extremes of melancholy and ecstasy; alternations - either gradual or abrupt - of acute intensity and deep serenity; an enormous spectrum of pitch and dynamics; powerful rhythms contrasting with passages of fluid recitative; fusions of tonality and modality.
Bloch - Suite No. 1 for Solo Cello
I Prelude II Allegro III Canzona IV Gigue
Bloch’s three suites for unaccompanied cello, composed in 1956-7, reflect his ‘late’ style, one which sums up much of the early expressivity yet within the formal concerns of a neo-Baroque idiom, evident in larger works such as the Concerto Grosso no.2 and Sinfonia. It is significantthat the first two unaccompanied Suites are dedicated to the Canadian cellist, Zara Nelsova. Bloch had first met her in 1949, and she was at once asked to participate in a London festival of his music. He was later to remark in gratitude: 'Nelsova is my music'. Like the concertante works such as Schelemo, the Suites attest to a declamatory eloquence, yet within the disciplined framework of an early 18th century ‘sonata da chiesa’ (church sonata), with its slow-fast-slow-fast movement structure. After a solemn ‘Prelude’, an ‘Allegro’ displays virtuoso writing. It is followed by am eloquently lyrical ‘Canzona’, leading to the final ebullient ‘Gigue’.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-96) - Three Preludes from 24 Preludes for Solo Cello, Op. 100 (1969)
Weinberg has been described as the third great Russian composer after Shostakovich and Prokofiev. He was born in Warsaw, where at the age of ten he was a pianist in the theatre where his father worked. At twelve he began studies at the Warsaw Conservatory, and when plans to study in the USA were thwarted by the onset of WWII, he emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he studied with Zolotaryov at the Minsk Conservatory between 1939 and 1941. In Tashkent where he married the daughter of the actor and director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre, Solomon Mikhoels, and encountered Shostakovich’s music which had a profound influence on him. Though he never studied with Shostakovich Weinberg showed him his works and formed a powerful spiritual and artistic friendship. It was though that friendship that Weinberg was saved from the fatal oppression of the Gulag, for Shostakovich intervened when Weinberg was jailed for three months in 1953 on account of his uncle being one of the doctors murdered in Stalin’s notorious antisemitic ‘Doctor’s Plot’.
At this time, Weinberg’s music was sustained though the interest of a few leading performers, such as Gilels, Rostropovich and Sanderling, who performed his works regularly in the 50s and 60s. Amongst his prolific output are twenty five symphonies and several operas. His style displays the influences of the Russian Modernists Shostakovich, Prokofiev as well as Bartók and Mahler. Many of his works are programmatic and autobiographical, such as the Symphony no.21 written in commemoration of the burning of the Warsaw ghetto where much of his family perished. At the same time his music also reaches out to a more universalistic expression of suffering and reconciliation.
The 24 Preludes for Solo Cello Op 100 were composed for and are dedicated to Rostropovich, who preiered several of Weinberg’s sonatas and cello works. For various reasons, notably the cellist’s support of Solzenitzen, there was a cooling down of their close friendship, and as a result Rostropovich never played the Preludes. Other cellists for whom Weinberg composed, such as Berlinsky, cellist of the Borodin Quartet, who premiered the 4th sonata, also neglected the Preludes. Thus it was that in 1995 Yossif Feigelson, who had been Rostropovich’s student in the late 60s, gave the world premiere, in Tallinn, Estonia. Happily, Feigelson’s release of the Preludes on CD soon after, on the Olympia label, was a recording which Rostropovich approved, and enjoyment. Inspired perhaps by Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes, themselves a reinterpretation of J S Bach, Weinberg’s Preludes trace the 24 major and minor keys in a distinctive pattern, rising up and descending down the chromatic scale from C major, framing the set by the cello’s lowest note C. Some of the Preludes display polyphonic textures, some use quotations profusely (such as No 21 which alludes to Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata and Concerto No,1), and some display neo-Baroque features such as the Gavotte (no.8) and Sarabande (No.18).
Solomon Senderey (1905-68) – A Jewish Dance
The music of Solomon (Samuil) Senderey is unfamiliar to audiences in the UK and Western Europe, yet the zest and vitality of A Jewish Dance suggests that his oeuvre is well worth rediscovery. He was born in Mogilev and died in 1968 in Moscow, where he had been music director for Solomon Mikhoel's Jewish Theatre in Moscow in late 30s and early 40s. When Mikhoels was murdered by Stalin on 12 January 1948, Senderey was sent to a concentration camp in Siberia, released only much later when Kruschev came to power. Amongst his major works are Variations for piano and orchestra (1946), Concert-Fantasy for violin and orchestra ‘Stempenu’ (1943), and many other works for orchestra, wind ensembles, choir, as well as transcriptions of Jewish folk songs.
A Jewish Dance is a lively piece that shows Senderey’s assimilation of klezmer dance styles, with a spicy chromatic idiom, that whets one’s appetite to discover more of his works. The piece is in simple ternary design. The tune of the outer sections is in two contrasting phrases, and in the reprise the second tune is shared between piano and cello. The piano initiates the sprightly tune of the middle section, which is then repeated in various keys, leading to a theatrical dialogue between pizzicato cello and piano, and a chromatic development leading back into the reprise.
Yosif Feigelson, cello with Malcolm Miller, piano
Programme Notes by Malcolm Miller (Bloch’s From Jewish Life, Suite no.1; Weinberg and Senderey) and Alex Knapp (Bloch Songs and ‘Nigun’) © 2007
About the Artists
The American pianist Miriam Brickman is internationally renowned as an artist of unusual creativity and range. She is the innovator of a unique program of dramatizations of the literary sources which inspire music and has explored the links between music and the sister arts. The New York Times wrote of her Lincoln Center recital: "It was indeed an unusual event to be greeted by an exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture related to the music inside." Ms. Brickman is active throughout the world as a chamber musician, and as soloist with many orchestras, including the Moscow Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Philharmonic under the batons of Maxim Shostakovich and Lukas Foss, respectively. She has performed in major venues such as Carnegie Recital Hall, and Lincoln Center in New York; Wigmore Hall, St. John’s Smith Square and the South Bank in London; as well as in France, Israel, India, Russia, the Czech Republic, Australia and New Zealand and Japan. Her four Southeast Asian tours, sponsored by the United States Information Service, included performances in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia. She has broadcast on the BBC (London); on WQXR, WNYC, WFUV, WEVD (New York); Radio Hong Kong; Radio Prague; Radio Moscow; and on television internationally. Since 1991, she has been invited to Russia four times, including St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kostamuksha, for solo, chamber, and orchestral concerts, including several programmes featuring the music of the English composer Ronald Senator, her husband. Among the numerous new works she has premiered and recorded as part of her extensive discography, many have been composed especially for her.
The soprano Andrea Rivers-Baron trained at the Royal Academy of Music. She was placed third in the Kathleen Ferrier prize, was runner up in the Royal Overseas League competition and has also taken part in master classes with Nadia Boulanger and Peter Pears. She has had a varied career including work as a teacher, singer and barrister. She has worked extensively with Alexander Knapp whom she met when they were both students at Cambridge University, and it was he who introduced her to the songs of Ernest Bloch. In 1988 she performed Bloch's Historiettes au Crepuscule, Poèmes d'Automne and his settings of Psalms 22,114 and 137, accompanied by pianist Roy Howat, at a concert at the Purcell Room in London in the presence of Suzanne Bloch, as part of the Bnai Brith Music Festival. Andrea founded "The Time of Singing" a group of musicians specialising in the performance of Jewish music, including liturgical and folk music in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino.
Zecharia Plavin, pianist, educator, and researcher, was born in Vilnius in 1956. He immigrated to Israel in 1977, following studies at the Ciurlionis School of Arts and Lithuanian Music Academy, and graduated with undergraduate and Masters degrees at the Music Academy of Tel Aviv University, receiving his doctorate at the Hebrew University. In 1984 he pursued advanced piano studies with the legendary pianist Louis Kentner. Zecharia Plavin has given concerts with the Israel PO, Jerusalem SO, and other orchestras in the USA, Poland, Lithuania and Israel. He also frequently gives recitals, special music and literature programmes and chamber music concerts in London, Paris, New York and many European countries, as well as in Israel, and has recorded CDs for labels including Meridian (England), Sound-Star-Ton (Germany) and Israel’s ‘Kol ha-Muzzika’ radio station. Since 1990 he has taught at the Jerusalem Academy and ‘HED’ Music College (Tel Aviv), and he has given piano master-classes in USA, Czech Republic, Germany and Israel. As a scholar, Zecharia Plavin has published prolifically, the author of books, chapters and articles on a wide variety of musical topics including the music Bloch and Israeli composers.
The acclaimed international cellist Yosif Feigelson was born in Latvia to a musical family: his father was an operatic tenor and his mother, an orchestra violinist. He studied in Riga, then at the Moscow Conservatory with the legendary cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and Natalia Gutman. Prizes at the prestigious Moscow Tchaikovsky (1974) and J.S.Bach Leipzig (1976) competitions, led to tours throughout the former Soviet Union, then, since the 1980s, with leading orchestras and in major venues across Europe and the USA, where he is based. His acclaimed New York orchestral debut in 1988 with the New York Chamber Symphony was followed by the prestigious 1990 Avery Fisher Career Grant. In 1996 his Dvorak Cello Concerto with the Detroit Symphony under Neeme Jarvi was broadcast worldwide, and in the same year he gave the world premiere of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's 24 Cello Preludes Op.100, subsequently recording them, together with Weinberg’s four cello sonatas, on the Olympia label. Mr. Feigelson regularly gives international masterclasses and performs with some of the world's best known musicians including Barbara Hendricks, Bella Davidovich, Yuri Bashmet, Neeme Jarvi, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Lukas Foss, Gerard Schwarz and Moshe Atzmon. In 1985 Mr Feigelson participated in ‘A Celebration of Ernest Bloch’, at SUNY Purchase, hosted by WQXR with Suzanne Bloch as a special guest.
Malcolm Miller is a musicologist and pianist, currently Associate Lecturer at the Open University. He received his doctorate from King’s College, London, with a study of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. Malcolm is Editor of Arietta, Journal of the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe and contributed a chapter on the 'Razumovsky' Quartets to The String Quartets of Beethoven (U. of Illinois Press). He has also contributed to the New Grove Dictionary of Music II, MGG, and The Routledge Companion to Modern Jewish Culture, and regularly publishes articles and reviews in journals such as Musical Opinion, Tempo, Piano, Musica Judaica, Jewish Renaissance, and the e-zine Music and Vision Daily. Malcolm was a speaker at the First International Conference on 'The Proms and British Musical Life' held at the British Library in April 2007. A pianist and accompanist for instrumentalists and singers, Malcolm has made several recordings. Recipient of a Millennium Award for his JMI project on ‘Piano Music by Composers in Israel’ he is Director of the JMI’s Forum for Israeli Music. Amongst his compositions are the Concertino for Shofar premiered at the Purcell Room in 2006, as part of the JMI celebration of 350 Years of Jewish settlement in Britain.
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