Joseph Achron is a
fascinating figure. He was born in what
was then Russian Lithuania into a well
off middle class family where the father
was an amateur cantor. He studied with
Maximilian Steinberg (whose five symphonies
DG and Neeme Järvi are steadily
recording). Scriabin had some influence
on Achron and on Scriabin’s death Achron
wrote an Epitaph in his memory. He was
a phenomenal violinist from a very young
age and toured widely. During the Great
War he served with the Russian Imperial
Army. In 1922 he moved to Berlin. He
was inspired by musical experiences
encountered while on a trip to Palestine
in 1925. He went to the USA in 1925.
After years in Chicago and NY he moved
to Los Angeles in 1934 where he formed
part of that group of sunset émigrés
including Zeisl, Castelnuovo-Tedesco,
Toch, Schoenberg and Piatigorsky. Achron’s
orchestral music has a Hollywood-like
lushness although his attempts to break
into the world of film music came to
very little.
Achron’s First Violin
Concerto is from his New York stay
having been written in 1925. It is thunderously
and clawingly rhapsodic (I, 21:09),
swayingly intense, with an ululating
Jewish flavour. This is mixed with romance
lushly vibrating between Barber, Delius
and Korngold. It is perhaps a case of
Bloch’s Violin Concerto on Hollywood
steroids but long before received cinematic
conventions had been formed. Contemporary
critics referred to its "Dionysian imbalanced
exaltation ... from restless, mysterious
meditation of strongly religious character
to dizzying Dervish-like ecstasy".
Elmar Oliveira is the
ideal soloist in the Achron well able
to mobilise a swooning tone and every
bit the master of the technical dimension.
The work is at its strongest in the
last ten minutes of the big first movement;
there are only two and the first lasts
almost 25 minutes. It was premiered
in Boston in 1927 with the composer
as soloist and the BSO conducted by
Koussevitsky. It has also been played
by Louis Krasner but has not made much
if any headway,.
The Golem suite
is vividly performed and recorded by
Schwarz and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.
The suite comprises five movements from
the music he wrote for the Yiddish Art
Theater’s production of The Golem by
H Leivick. The Golem is a creature made
from clay by man and into which life
is breathed by imprinting into the clay
the tetragrammaton (the actual name
of God). That life can be taken away
just as easily by smudging out the name.
The Golem also operates as a spiritual-mystical
concept at other levels in the arcana
of Jewish legends and lore. The present
suite is for an orchestra much expanded
from the original scoring of four instruments.
It is wonderfully luminous, atmospheric,
rhythmically ingenious and brooding
especially in the outer movements portraying
the Creation and then the Petrifying
of the Golem. The Golem’s Rampage
sounds like a fragmentary sketch
for Shostakovich Leningrad (the
great march). Many names and works spring
to mind: Kurt Weill’s shabby-sleazy
triumphant music, Nielsen’s Symphony
No. 5, Janáček’s Sinfonietta
and Vaughan Williams’ Fourth. The revels
of the prominent tuba and the determined
piano in Dance of the Phantom Spirits
are memorable as is the trombone’s abrasive
blast - a special joy (tr. 6 1.14).
The two Belshazzar
tableaux, after the initial call
to arms, sound like a lyrical match
between Rozsa (Notturno Ungharese,
Hungarian Sketches, Vintner’s
Daughter and Variations on a
Hungarian Song) and Kodály
(Summer Evening and The Peacock
Variations) - very Hungarian in
style. The forwardly placed and buoyant
writing for brass is very much part
of the Achron soundscape. Then again
he also conjures some glowingly impressionistic
images (5:04 of the tr. 8) and in the
Delian shimmer that is the last section
of the Allergo Energico. Intriguingly,
after the rhythmic shudderings at the
start of the second tableau (The
Feast), the music settles into a
demotic good-humoured dance which is
as engagingly bright-eyed as anything
by Bliss, Guridi, Canteloube, Freitas
Branco or Braga-Santos. The second tableau
ends in a blaze of gorgeous sound. Respighi’s
Vetrate di Chiesa look to your
laurels.
Already sixteen more
Milken Archive CDs have been issued
bringing the total currently issued
to 26. This is just past the halfway
marker for this ambitious project which
is blessed by its association with Naxos
and its associated accessibility at
bargain price. While only ten of the
Milken series are currently available
in the UK a further sixteen are accessible
in the USA and more are to come.
To see full details
of the series please look at www.milkenarchive.org/cds/cds.taf
It is a real pleasure
to hear Achron’s music beyond the clutch
of violin solos. He is much more than
a pyrotechnician for aspirants of Heifetz.
More Achron please.
Rob Barnett
see Milken
Archive of American Jewish Music
Barcelona Symphony/National Orchestra of
Catalonia/Gerard Schwarz 
