Paul Schoenfield

*  Concerto for Viola and Orchestra
*  Four Motets
*  The Merchant and the Pauper (excerpts from Act II)

Robert Vernon (viola), Berlin Radio Symphony/Yoel Levi
BBC Singers/Avner Itai
University of Michigan Opera/Kenneth Kiesler.

Naxos 8.559418 Total time: 57:41

Summary for the Busy Executive: Lubavitcher ecstasy.

This is the second CD in Naxos's Milken Archives series which addresses
the music of Paul Schoenfield, one of the best American composers now
writing.  Unlike many American Jewish composers, Schoenfield makes a big
artistic deal of his Judaism and of Jewish culture in general.  However,
the whiff of neither ersatz piety nor exoticism clings to this music.
It's above all the expression of a highly individual point of view.
Schoenfield is a bit of a musical magpie, taking from all kinds of music
and stirring the elements into an original brew -- a bit like Ives in
that regard.  Klezmer, cantorial chant, folk music, jazz, Broadway, and
the classical tradition all bubble to the surface at some time or another,
often within the same piece.  The fact that all these elements link up
-- convincingly so -- in Schoenfield's mind indicates an original
sensibility, if nothing else.  He has called himself a folk composer,
but adds that folk musicians don't generally have the chops to play what
he writes.  In short, don't be surprised at anything that might turn up
in one of his pieces.

The viola concerto seems relatively conventional, but only when you
compare it to something like his Klezmer Rondos.  The same magpie mentality
still operates.  For instance, you get the meditative music you expect
from a viola concerto.  However, you also get other stuff.  The first
movement, titled "Gan Tzippi," the name of the kindergarten in the kibbutz
where Schoenfield lived for a time, comes from Schoenfield's memory of
the songs the children sung that wafted from the school to his study.
Some of these, he later discovered, were liturgical and Hassidic in
origin.  All of this gets transmuted, and we wind up with a mix of Bloch
meditation (though more subdued than Bloch's own Suite for Viola), Bartok
song and color, and Shostakovich dance.  The slow second movement,
"Soliloquy," begins appropriately enough with an extended viola solo.
It sings deep as a river, but it's also the most conventional -- what
you expect "Jewish" concert music to sound like, in the same emotional
neighborhood as Bloch's "Nigun." You realize much later that Schoenfield
has taken you on a profound, transformational journey in a very short
amount of time.  The finale, an energetic rondo inspired the story of
King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, manically capers,
much like the quicker parts of Shostakovich's cello concerti or the
scherzo to Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, with here and there a kind of
radiant rapture shining through.

The cream of North American choirs -- The Dale Warland Singers, The
Phoenix Bach Choir, Chanticleer, and La Vie -- jointly commissioned the
Four Motets, settings in Hebrew of verses from Psalm 86.  The Psalm in
general somberly asks for forgiveness, mercy, and the strength to do
right.  Schoenfield has written these under the obvious influence of
Renaissance polyphony, particularly the Mannerist composers (the third
motet sounds as if Gesualdo could have composed it).  The Mannerist vibe
comes down to the expanded harmonic sense and the relative freedom of
dissonance found in the music of the last hundred years, rather than
from an interest in psychological extremes.  These are pieces of tremendous
craft and tremendous risk.  First, the motets, all slow, run the danger
of blending into each other.  I worried about this but reasoned that you
could perform them all separately, if you chose.  On repeated listening,
however, their differences became ever more distinct, to the point where
I now think Schoenfield skirted the trap.  Second, the polyphony is, if
not thick, then full, and you can't really predict its course.  A choir
must crack some hard nuts.  Nevertheless, the superb choral writing has
the virtue of efficiency.  You don't get the sense of extraneous notes
thrown in, and the writing makes a good choir sound perhaps better than
it is and a great choir as if it sang the music for which it was formed.
As far as music based on Jewish liturgy goes, these works rank with
Bloch, Bernstein, and Schoenberg.  Incidentally, Holst made a lovely
setting of this same psalm, available on Hyperion CDA66329.

Naxos fills out the program with excerpts from the second act of
Schoenfield's opera The Merchant and the Pauper.  The composer based the
work's form on the medieval purimspiel -- essentially, a farce on the
Purim story, about an abortive attempt to exterminate the Persian Jews.
The duality, more than anything, of a farce on horrifying events seems
to have caught Schoenfield's interest.  The opera's actual plot, however,
comes from the Hassidic reb Nahman of Bratslav, founder of the Bratslaver
sect.  At least some literary critics trace modern Jewish literature --
one thinks of I.  B.  Singer especially -- to the tales written by Nahman,
who clothed (or, more accurately, hid) his theology in these stories.
The plot reads like a fairy tale: A boy and girl promised to each other
by their fathers -- a merchant and a pauper, respectively -- are kept
apart when the pauper (who has in the meantime become not only rich, but
emperor) goes back on his word, ruins the merchant and conspires to throw
the son into the sea.  The son escapes, but washes up on an abandoned
island.  Meanwhile the girl gets kidnapped by pirates.  A storm maroons
the girl on (just guess!) the exact same island as the son.  From then
on, it's just a matter of time before the happy ever after.  Like almost
all fairy tales, you can take the plot as seriously as you want.  Some
have seen it as a metaphor for the union of the Messiah with the Glory
of God, thus giving Schoenfield the duality that attracted him to the
purimspiel in the first place.

But all this is really beside the point.  After all, an opera isn't
primarily theology or even story (think about Il Trovatore's plot and
not get a headache), but music, and the music is not only wonderful, but
dramatic and even theatrical.  Schoenfield blends such diverse elements
as melodrama (spoken narration over music), choruses, the standard arias
and love duets, and even an authentic Bratislaver tune with Yiddish
lyrics and comes up with something both entertaining and profound.  I
emphasize, however, that the profundity for me lies not in the doctrine
expressed, but in the music itself.  For example, there's a terrific
chorus of "wild animals" that sings the abundance of Nature and God --
richly sensuous.  It reminds me a little of Rozsa's "Song of the Jungle"
from The Jungle Book, and I mean a compliment.  The love duets, often
to verses from The Song of Songs, rise to ecstatic heights with no
apparent strain.  I want to see this opera live, something I can't say
of too many.  Only the fact of excerpts disappoints me, and, the facts
of opera and opera recording in this country being what they are, I will
probably die long before a complete recording comes out.

The performances of all the works are at least fine, and in one case
stunning.  Violist Robert Vernon has been the stalwart first chair of
the Cleveland Orchestra for decades.  He has the intonation and tonal
strength of a first-class violinist.  You don't hear any of the hesitancy,
timbral dullness, and scratch of so many violists.  The reading, led by
Yoel Levi, penetrates many of the layers of the concerto, but it's still
a first recording.  One can imagine a better one, but this is a damn
good place from which to start.  The University of Michigan Opera Theater,
directed by Kenneth Kiesler, operates at the level of a very capable
regional opera company.  The voices are better than I, for one, expected
(as a former Ann Aborite), but the singers are all singing actors, with
baritone Gary Moss standing out musically and dramatically as the
merchant's son.

However, the BBC Singers, under Israeli choral legend Avner Itai, deliver
something glorious.  This is a world-class ensemble.  In this country,
only the Dale Warland Singers operated at their level, as far as I'm
concerned.  In fact, the BBC-ers may have become the best in the world
among those groups not specializing in a particular repertoire.  Have
they gotten better?  I have lots of recordings of these guys dating back
to the early Seventies, and I can't remember them doing so well.  They
have it all: diction, clarity, rhythmic accuracy, phrasing, and a drop-dead
gorgeous choral tone.

I consider this one of the outstanding releases, not only in the Naxos
series, but for the year -- a major event, I think, in the reception of
Schoenfield's music.

Steve Schwartz