January/February 2009-Jewish Enterprise
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JEWISH ENTERPRISE  
 
Stewart Spread

New Life for Lost Jewish Music

It was Robyn Krauthammer who came up with the idea for what was to become Pro Musica Hebraica—a project to revive forgotten Jewish classical music from a century ago. A lawyer turned painter and sculptor, Robyn converted to Judaism before her marriage to Charles Krauthammer, the influential conservative columnist. “She is more Jewish than I am,” Charles says, smiling at his wife. “She has a real love and feeling for it.”

Pro Musica Hebraica grew out of a conversation Robyn had with the cantor at the couple’s Maryland synagogue about lost Jewish music. “I was intrigued when he told us that the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov criticized his Jewish students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory for not applying their own heritage to their music,” she says, “so they formed the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music in 1908.”

Charles interjects: “Originally, they called it the Society for Jewish Music, but one of the tsar’s bureaucrats couldn’t imagine that Jews were capable of classical music, so he added ‘folk’ to the name.”

Most of this rich, passionate Jewish music was suppressed by the Communists when they came to power and was never performed. To rescue the repertoire from oblivion and bring it to the stage, the Krauthammers founded Pro Musica Hebraica in 2004. They began by recruiting James Loeffler, an assistant professor of European Jewish history at the University of Virginia, as research director. Loeffler combed through the archives of the former Soviet Union for unpublished manuscripts and recordings. “Ironically, much of the music survived because the Soviets saved all the paper, locking it up in benign neglect,” he says. “I was able to unlock it because there were librarians who held on to it for decades.”

The St. Petersburg Society, Loeffler explains, gave rise to what would become known as Jewish art music—music that deliberately melded Western and Russian classical music with Hasidic melodies, Yiddish folk songs and synagogue chants, capturing the sounds of the towns and villages of the Pale of Settlement. The unprecedented embrace of Jewish music influenced Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, two of the greatest Russian composers.

Nevertheless, Pro Musica Hebraica found it difficult at first to attract world-class musicians to play the music. “Many musicians have no time for specifically Jewish music,” says Robyn, “and they are in total ignorance of Jewish music of the early 20th century from Eastern Europe.”

“It took us four years to find the musicians,” Charles continues. “Many musicians and agents refused. There was great resistance. Musicians want to be out in the broader culture. They are afraid of being thought too parochial.”

The musicians for the first Pro Musica Hebraica concert held at the Kennedy Center in April of 2008, the Biava String Quartet, came from the Juilliard School of Music. The quartet’s members were joined by famous Jewish Juilliard alumnus, violinist Itzhak Perlman. The concert, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of the St. Petersburg Society’s formation, featured unknown works by Alexander Krein, Joel Engel and Mikhail Gnesin, and by contemporary Argentine Jew Osvaldo Golijov, whose music they influenced.

A second Kennedy Center concert last November was performed by the ARC Ensemble (Artists of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada). The concert featured the music of one of the last century’s least-known Jewish geniuses, Mieczyslaw Weinberg.

Born in Warsaw, Weinberg studied in Minsk and Tashkent before moving to Moscow, where he became a close friend of Shostakovich. Members of Weinberg’s family were killed in the Holocaust, and he himself was considered suspect by Stalin. When, in 1953, he was arrested on charges of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism,” Shostakovich bravely intervened on his behalf. “The Weinberg-Shostakovich relationship produced several of the most important modern chamber music masterpieces to emerge from Eastern Europe,” Loeffler says. The Washington Post reviewer, Rebecca Ritzel, called Weinberg’s clarinet sonata “a piece that evokes klezmer without ever sounding kitsch,” and his pianoquintet “music [that] is equal parts grief and nostalgia.”

In addition to Weinberg’s compositions, the concert included a piece for cello and piano by Holocaust survivor Szymon Laks and Prokofiev’s “Overture on Hebrew Themes.” Loeffler calls the latter “one of the rare Jewish works in the mainstream classical repertoire—both in its title, its references to klezmer music and its use of Jewish folk melody.” Written by Prokofiev in 1919 in New York, the piece was popular in the Soviet Union, but was stripped of its Jewish title and known only as “The Sextet.”

Pro Musica Hebraica has an ambitious agenda. Two Kennedy Center concerts are planned for 2009: A March performance will include the music of Joseph Achron, Russian–born Hollywood film composer Michel Michelet and Shostakovich, whose Fourth String Quartet is said to have been inspired by his exposure to Jewish folk music. A fall concert will highlight the Jewish baroque music of Salamone de Rossi, a Sephardic Italian Jew of the Renaissance, performed by the Apollo Ensemble of Amsterdam. In the future, the Krauthammers plan to publish definitive editions of scores, encourage conservatories to promote the music and create recordings for educational archives.

The project is part of a wider revival of Jewish music around the world. “We are starting to see the phenomenon of artists beginning to tap into Jewish tradition and melding it with reggae, cantorial music, Sephardic and klezmer music,” Loeffler says. Already, James Conlon, the music director of the Los Angeles Opera and also Pro Musica Hebraica’s artistic director, has launched a program called “Recovered Voices” to bring the music of composers suppressed by the Nazi regime to the opera stage.

Ultimately, the Krauthammers hope that their efforts will help inspire new Jewish art music. They are encouraged by the enthusiasm of the artists with whom they work. “The musicians in the Biava Quartet and the ARC Ensemble are in complete sympathy with the music although all but one are non-Jewish,” Charles says. “This shows how music can promote real understanding of different cultures.”—Eileen Lavine

Click here to read more about Charles Krauthammer.

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