Introducing the world of American Jewish Music:
       Rare, New, and Rediscovered American Classics

* Excerpts from works by Brubeck, Bernstein, Milhaud, Schoenfield, Toch,
Wyner, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Weill, and others.

Various orchestras and performers.
Naxos 8.559406  TT: 79:13

Summary for the Busy Executive: A sampler.

When you think about it, the United States has produced or nurtured
remarkable number of composers with Jewish backgrounds.  There's Bernstein
and Copland, of course, but also Foss, Diamond, Reich, Glass, Shapero,
Lees, Irving Fine, Gershwin, Schiff, Kernis, and so on, only some of
whom found their way to this disc.  Lowell Milken founded the Milken
Archive of American Jewish Music to document, save, and promote this
work.  The Archive doesn't confine itself to classical composers or
composers who intend their music for the concert hall.  There's Yiddish
musical and vaudeville, traditional liturgical music arranged for worship
or for recording, and new music intended for worship services.  Of course,
one soon encounters these two vexing questions: what is American music,
and what is Jewish music?  I have little idea of Dave Brubeck's family
background, but I do know he converted to Roman Catholicism.  Toch,
Milhaud, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Weill all come from Jewish families,
but (with the exception of Weill) their American music doesn't differ
all that much from the music they wrote in Europe.  Is Britten an American
composer because he wrote his Paul Bunyan in the United States?  Pursuing
the answers to such questions doesn't normally take up much of my time,
but then again I'm not the Milken Archive, which (in the case of Brubeck
especially) seems to keep its definitions loose.  On the other hand, can
one really think of Jewish composers living in America and not come up
with Ernest Bloch or Aaron Copland?  Neither of the two show up on the
sampler.

At any rate, this is a glorious project.  So much of this music is
too good to lose, written by Americans or Jews or anybody else, for
that matter.  Already the Archive has validated its worth by staging
Kurt Weill's most ambitious piece, The Eternal Road.  And now we have a
recording, and this is just one of the Archive's many good deeds.  Allied
with Naxos's "American Classics" series, they've opened up a new area
of musical exploration for the rest of us, not just scholars and those
people lucky enough to live in the cities where these performances have
taken place.  Naxos has released about a dozen of these CDs so far.  In
the weeks to come, I'll be reporting on at least some of them.  At any
rate, this sampler provides a number of "heads-up" to a listener inclined
to wander off well-worn paths.

Steve Schwartz