Klezmer Concertos and Encores

* Starer: K'li Zemer*
* Schoenfield: Klezmer Rondos**
* Weinberg: The Maypole; Canzonetta^
* Ellstein: Hassidic Dance^
* Golijov: Rocketekya^^

David Krakauer (clarinet)* ^ ^^, Scott Goff (flute)**, Alberto Mizrahi
(tenor), Alicia Svigals (violin)^^, Martha Mooke (electric viola)^^,
Pablo Aslan (bass)^^, Barcelona Symphony/National Orchestra of Catalonia*,
Seattle Symphony**, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin^/Gerard Schwarz
Naxos 8.559403 {DDD} Total time: 67:05

Summary for the Busy Executive: Play, klezmer!  Play!

Literally, "k'li zemer" means "instrument of song," slurred to the
more common "klezmer," which means "musician." Klezmer music -- rather
pleonastically named -- has come to refer mainly to the music played by
the Jewish wedding bands of Eastern Europe.  Many now associate it with
the Hassidic sect of Judaism.  One of the Klezmatics, I believe, defined
klezmer music as "Jewish jazz." That's certainly true of American klezmer,
influenced by its lively surroundings, but klezmer isn't really limited
to these borders.  It absorbed the surrounding music from every country
in which it was played.  South American musicians allied the wails of
the klezmer band to a samba beat.  Still, klezmer from one country binds
itself to that of another by a certain sound.  The clarinet -- sometimes
the flute or the violin -- takes the lead, and there's a certain sharpness
of intonation that gives a bite.  The lead instrument sings floridly,
in the manner of cantorial chant, usually over a strong dance beat.

All the composers here celebrate this sound in their own way.  One
writer's work differs markedly from his colleagues, and one moves over
a large span of styles -- from the relatively straightforward and simple
arrangements of Jacob Weinberg, to the "crossover" arrangements of
Ellstein, the classic Modernism of Robert Starer, the effervescent
post-Modern eclecticism of Paul Schoenfield, and the electrified (and
electrifying) Osvaldo Golijov.  Weinberg, a Russian intellectual city
boy with no personal ties to klezmer, approaches the tunes much as Brahms
did "gypsy" music: that is, taming the music by smoothing it into a
current idiom -- Tchaikovskian, in Weinberg's case.  Abraham Ellstein's
a bit more complicated.  Some may recognize the name as one of the "big
four" composers for the American Yiddish theater, but Ellstein studied,
among other places, at Juilliard.  He knew far more music than he needed
to write songs for the theater, and indeed he has classical pieces in
his catalogue.  However, he was also a working commercial musician,
particularly as an arranger of recording repertoire for the likes of Jan
Peerce and Richard Tucker.  His "Hassidic Dance" leans a bit toward that
category.  The accompaniment shows that Ellstein has at least listened
to his Modernist contemporaries, but the real strength of the piece comes
from Ellstein's refusal to prettify the melody.  He goes for the klezmer
whine in the tune, even though his accompaniment smoothes out the bite,
like cream in dark-roast coffee.

Starer -- composer of a terrific viola concerto, incidentally -- takes
klezmer into a personal idiom with a neoclassical base for his K'li
Zemer, in effect a clarinet concerto.  Actually, he doesn't limit the
piece to klezmer but rather explores more implications of "k'li zemer,"
"instrument of song." Starer essentially writes a concerted suite for
clarinet and small orchestra.  We begin in the synagogue with the first
movement, "T'fillot (Prayers)," allowing the clarinet to evoke cantorial
chant without quotation.  The movement flies across a wide range of
emotion -- meditative, tender, passionate, angry -- in a similar way as
Bloch's Schelomo.  Although the two composers' idioms differ, they share
a particular mix of contemplation and ardor.  The second movement bursts
in -- a rapid dance in mixed meter (it may remind some of Bernstein's
take on Middle Eastern dances) with breaks featuring solo licks from the
clarinet.  The slow movement, "Manginot" (Melodies), hovers between
accompanied song and counterpoint.  The greater part of it caresses.
Again, the composer suspends work's progress with improvisatory-like
interludes (duets, mostly) for the clarinet and other melody instruments.
The third movement mainly declaims, and again the composer interrupts
with solo clarinet commentary.  It seems to me the improvisation of
klezmer attracts the composer as much as anything else and seems to
represent the self at its most particular.  "O, for a muse of fire,"
says Shakespeare.  I wish I could convey how powerfully moving this work
is.  Any comparison I want to make to someone else's work seems to me
to lessen it and furthermore to smear, rather than to sharpen, its
outlines.  Starer may be almost as powerful as Bloch or almost as
electrifying as Bernstein, but he's first and foremost his own man,
with a concentration foreign to Bloch and an emotional balance beyond
Bernstein.  If anything, in this concerto, I think of Starer as a kind
of Jewish Nielsen.

Paul Schoenfield began Klezmer Rondos as a commission for flutist Carol
Wincenc.  That incarnation of the piece used to be available on the
defunct Argo label (440 212-2).  Understandably, it was originally billed
as a concerto, but this belies its true character.  The flute is simply
one soloist among many.  However, one categorizes the work with difficulty.
It reaches out both to the Baroque concerto grosso and to the Romantic
tone poem, as well as to the "stewpot scherzos" of Charles Ives (think
of the "Hawthorne" movement in the Concord Sonata).  Indeed, it reminds
me most of Ives, but again not because of Schoenfield's musical language.
At any rate, Schoenfield revised the work, dropping a long saxophone
passage and picking up a tenor soloist, among other things, along the
way.  The opening bars, as the orchestra imitates a raucous Second Avenue
theater pit band, tell you this work not only flouts concerto conventions,
but expectations of concert music itself.  Yiddish-American klezmer runs
through the concerto, but so do Bernsteinian takes on jazz, particularly
the On the Town and Mass incarnations, a song of the Lubavitcher Hassidim,
Threepenny Opera Weill, a hint of Gershwin, and even a little Richard
Rodgers here and there.  It's a wonderful, messy work which conjures up
the rich world of the lower East Side, and I can think of few composers
other than Schoenfield who could hold it all together.  One high point
among many in the first movement has to be the tenor solo wowing the
crowd with a song by Schoenfield that proudly proclaims its Yiddish
theater heritage: "Mirele," with words by poet Michl Virt.  The second
movement, played without pause, begins with a whiney cadenza from the
flute against a shimmering background.  This sort of thing takes
considerable composing chops, especially since it lasts about half the
movement.  Schoenfield never loses a listener's interest or takes the
easy way out of just noodling around chromatically.  He does make the
flute sound as if it's simply riffing, but he always has some musical
point to make.  At the start of the movement's second half, the orchestra
takes up with what sounds to me like a slow wedding dance and eventually
speeds up to a manic pace.  Ideas from the first movement reappear,
including snatches of "Mirele," all jostling together.  It reminds me
a bit of those crowded panels of the old Harvey Kurtzman Mad magazine,
where something hysterically insane seemed to peek out from every obscure
(and sometimes not-so-obscure) nook.  The band drops back briefly to
catch its breath, winding up for the final frenzied assault.  The clarinet,
by the way, at this point asserts itself more than the flute.  So much
for a vehicle for a star flutist.

Osvaldo Golijov mixes influences from his native South America (including
Piazzola) with Bartok, Prokofiev, Bernstein, some George Crumb and a
pinch of minimalism, and, of course, Eastern European klezmer and even
Jewish liturgical music.  I find him a little uneven, but at his best
he wows me.  Rocketekya falls unquestionably into the wow bin.  Golijov
explains its title by referring to the piece's origin in a vision of a
shofar sounding in a rocket (the Hebrew tekya means "to blow").  Definitely
odd, but there you are.  It's a chamber quartet for the unconventional
ensemble of clarinet, violin, electric viola, and bass.  The sound is
almost pure acid, accentuated by the sharpness and a repertoire of "alien"
sounds (including 78 rpm record "crackle") from the electric viola.  The
piece opens with a jazzy, samba-like beat.  One hears the heterophony
of hard bop in many of the quieter parts.  Rocketekya rockets along.  I
have no idea how it holds together or why it holds together so compellingly.
Basically, it just scoops me up and takes me for an exciting ride.

The performers are uniformly wonderful.  Who'd have thought Catalonians
were my landsleit?  Schwarz gets readings as exciting as I've ever heard
from him.  Krakauer does heroic, fearless work on the clarinet in works
of widely different character.  Scott Goff plays sensitively amidst the
whirl of the Schoenfield.  Tenor Alberto Mizrahi brings down the house
in "Mirele." The Rocketekya ensemble swings hard, driven by bassist Pablo
Aslan.

An outstanding disc from Naxos and the Milken Archive.

Steve Schwartz