This is one of the
first of the Milken Archive series of
discs of American Jewish music I’ve
encountered. It collates a trio of composers
whose aesthetic is very different and
whose histories represent different
sides of Jewish American experience.
Aaron Avshalomov was
born in what is now eastern Siberia
in 1894 and his story was marked by
travel – first to study medicine in
Zurich, then to America and then back
to China, through which he’d earlier
passed en route for San Francisco. Librarian
and conductor in Shanghai he was imprisoned
during the Japanese occupation; he only
settled permanently in the United States
after the War, spending the last nineteen
or so years of his life there. His Second
Symphony was commissioned by Koussevitzky
but he failed to make much mark on the
populous American musical scene.
His Four Biblical
Tableaux date from 1928 and occupy
an axis roughly adjacent to Rimsky-Korsakov
meets Bloch. The music is explicitly
Hebraic though his interest in Chinese
music makes itself manifest in the second
movement, Rebecca by the Well
in the shape of airy winds and percussion.
Evocative wind and string textured the
third tableaux impresses through its
detail and warmth - though the Processional
finale rather takes the easy way out
with its deliberately antique sonorities.
Still, this is both competently crafted
and sympathetically warm.
Sheila Silver was born
in 1946 and is by a generation the youngest
of the trio of composers. Silver studied
at the University of California at Berkeley
in 1968 and has studied with Harold
Shapero, an admirable musician and composer,
as well as Arthur Berger and Seymour
Shifrin. She currently teaches, and
composes for a wide variety of media.
Shirat Sara was conceived whilst
she was living in Jerusalem but composed
back in America in 1984. It’s a three-movement
tone poem on a Biblical theme – Abraham’s
wife Sarah’s frustration at her inability
to conceive, and the subsequent birth
of her son Isaac in her old age. Basically
tonal and with great swathes of colour
and rhythmic bite there is plenty to
detain the ear - see-sawy strings, a
mysterioso element, and dark
lower strings that play against the
higher ones. The finale is the most
clearly Hebraic but also the most musically
challenging – ending in spare, quizzical
lines followed by final, resolutory
chords. The element of unease and tension,
of things questioned and then, seemingly,
resolved is a narrative thread that
runs through the tone poem. A rewarding
work - but one that sticks to its modernist
guns.
Jan Meyerowitz was
born in 1915 and died a couple of years
before his Symphony Midrash Esther
was recorded, though it was written
in 1954. He was born in what was then
Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland)
in 1915 into what he believed was a
Christian family. He learnt the
truth at eighteen. By 1927 he was in
Berlin studying with Zemlinsky and later
with Respighi and Casella in Rome. He
emigrated to America in 1946 where he
pursued a successful career, writing
widely (including a number of operas).
Midrash Esther is another tone
poem that takes the Book of Esther and
the time of tribulation at the hands
of the Persian Empire. There are four
movements and the first, by some way
the shortest, is a slow movement full
of powerful tread and prophetic foreboding.
The second is suffused with fraught,
baleful brass, uneasy sinuous winds,
and a pretty much unrelenting sense
of tension and unease, which the third
movement, an adagio-cantabilissimo (!)
tries to disperse. The finale is a vibrant,
lusty celebration with an extensive
role for solo violin, brass and percussion
– in fact the whole orchestra responds
with colour and felicity, and though
the themes themselves are not especially
distinguished they certainly generate
a real drama.
With the expectedly
fine profusion of notes and supporting
information this can safely be recommended
to inquisitive listeners. There’s a
great deal of variety, geographic, aesthetic,
temporal – and some splendid performances
to boot.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review
by Colin Clarke
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra/Yoel Levi 
