Max
Helfman was born in Radzin in Poland; his family emigrated
to America when he was eight. He received a traditional Jewish
religious education and – without the doubtful benefits of
a university education – he later established himself as
a choirmaster and organist and began to write special settings
for various synagogues; especially at Temple Israel in Manhattan.
In his late twenties he was awarded a three-year fellowship
at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where he studied
piano, composition and conducting - this last with Fritz
Reiner. He was active very widely in the field of American
Jewish music; his work as director of the Freiheits gezang
verein and the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus, politically-leftward-leaning
choirs was particularly important and interesting. In 1945
he was appointed artistic director of the new Jewish Arts
Committee in New York, established to promote artistic activities
loosely in support of the Zionist/Palestinian movement. He
also became associated with the supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis and the idealistic educator Shlomo Bardin. These
associations put him near the centre of the musical life
of the American Jewish community, not least through the Brandeis
Arts Institute. He became increasingly influential as a teacher.
Later he moved to the West Coast of America working first
at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and then as Dean
of Fine Arts at the Institute of Judaism in Los Angeles,
where the staff included Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco, Roy Harris
and Lukas Foss. In short, Helfman was a central figure in
American Jewish music in the twentieth century - there is
a brief biography,
Max Helfman: A Biographical Sketch, by
Philip Moddel (Berkeley, California, 1974).
The longest work on this CD is Di Naye Hagode (‘The
New Haggada’, ‘The New Narrative’). The text, presumably
edited by Helfman, is based on the poem Di shots fun varshever
geto – The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto – by the
Russian Yiddish poet Itsik Fefer (1900-52). Neil Levin’s
extensive notes provides a moving account of the vile destruction
of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, and a fascinating account of
Fefer and his ambiguous life and death, valuable contexts
for the hearing of Di Naye Hagode. Helfman’s work
interweaves spoken contributions, in English, by a narrator
and choral passages in Yiddish. The libretto – like the poem
on which it is based – is not so much a lament as a commemoration
of the active heroism of the Jewish resistance. Helfman’s
music has considerable rhetorical power and communicates
an appropriate strength of feeling. However, it cannot be
said that the music is especially interesting – its power
is, as it were, largely the product of its extra-musical
content. On second and third listenings I felt more and more
that the musical imagination fell some way short of being
able to do full justice to its subject matter.
The two shorter works recorded here are musically more satisfying.
Indeed, Hag Habikkurim is quite lovely, described
as a “choral pageant” and made up of arrangements of eight
modern Hebrew songs (one is repeated) sung in Palestine,
before the creation of the state of Israel. Helfman intended
the work to be part of a presentation that would also incorporate
dance, narration and pantomime. Even without such non-musical
aids, the optimistic spirit of revival and hope that characterises
these songs is beautifully articulated and sensitively performed
by the women of the Coro Hebraico. The work’s title translates
as ‘Festival of the First Fruits’ and the work communicates
both a sense of beginnings and of tribute paid. It is a moving
work, to which later events have added an unintended poignancy.
The CD closes with extracts from Helfman’s setting of the
Sabbath morning Torah Service which, as Levin notes, can
perhaps be regarded as a work for the concert hall as much
as for ritual use in the synagogue. Particularly impressive
is the setting of the beautiful prayer ‘Adonai, Adonai’,
memorably performed by Cantor Raphael Frieder.
Something of a mixed bag, then. The most ambitious work here
takes on more than the composer can finally handle or resolve
musically; in the two ‘lesser’ works there is some fine,
striking writing. So far as his music goes – as opposed to
his evidently charismatic personality – it is in these two
works that one can most clearly hear why Helfman was so highly
regarded by so many of his contemporaries and successors.
Glyn Pursglove
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1 Theodore
Bikel (narrator); Choral Society of Southern California;
Los Angeles Zimriyah Chorale; Young
Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra/Nick Strimple; 2 Coro
Hebraeico/Neil Levin; 3 Cantor Raphael Frieder;
Slovak Chamber Choir; Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra/Samuel
Adler 
