Jewish Tone Poems

"Meyerowitz's score is magisterial. After the initial chorale-like religiosity, a punchy and very angular second movement (depicting Haman) leads to a movement memorably marked, 'Adagio-cantabilissimo'. Indeed there are many cantabile lines, contrasting with the active, and even quite dance-inspired, finale. This is an excellent, extrovert way to end an enjoyable and instructive disc. Recommended."
- Colin Clarke, MusicWeb International, August 2005

A quintet of biblical heroines—the matriarchs Sarah and Rebecca, kinswomen by marriage Ruth and Naomi, and the courageous Queen Esther—inspired the three tone poems by 20th-century composers heard on these world premiere recordings. Ranging from lush neo-Romanticism to a knottier modernist idiom, these evocative works illustrate the powerful stimulus to the creative imagination exerted by these remarkable women.

Born in eastern Siberia, Aaron Avshalomov (1894-1964) studied briefly at the Zurich conservatory and, apart from a three-year sojourn in the United States, lived until 1947 in China, where he wrote operas and concertos and became conductor of the Shanghai City Symphony before immigrating to the United States. As Milken Archive Artistic Director Neil Levin explains, Avshalomov's creative approach involved grafting "elements of traditional Chinese music—which he had first encountered as a child among the Chinese community of his Siberian hometown—onto a colorful Russian style in the manner of Rimsky-Korsakov." He used the Western-oriented symphony orchestra to imitate and evoke sounds of traditional Chinese instruments, adapted characteristic ornamentations, and used such instruments as temple blocks and finger cymbals.

In his notes for Four Biblical Tableaux, Jacob Avshalomov, also a composer, remarks that despite his father's scant Jewish education and religious upbringing, he had "absorbed enough of his heritage to both inspire and facilitate the composition of this work, which portrays three biblical scenes populated by Jewish heroines—Queen Esther's Prayer, Rebecca by the Well, and Ruth and Naomi, followed by a Processional." He further points out that in addition to the Chinese influence, this work also reflects his father's admiration for the music of Ernest Bloch, particularly in the occasional use of the melodic interval of the augmented second, cadences on open fifths, and organically conceived grace notes, features that can also be found in traditional Chinese music.

Seattle-born Sheila Silver (b. 1946) studied composition with such major figures as Gyorgy Ligeti, Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero and Jacob Druckman, and has won many prestigious awards and commissions. Among her compositions, which include chamber music, song cycles, piano pieces and an opera, are several Judaically related works, including a Psalm setting commissioned by the Gregg Smith Singers and a piano trio inspired by Primo Levi's writings on the Holocaust. The tone poem Shirat Sara (Song of Sarah), a symphony for strings with the concertmaster as soloist, was conceived while the composer was living in Jerusalem's Old City, where she was exposed to various traditional musical elements. The work revolves around the first matriarch of the Jewish people, Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Each of the three movements depicts one of the major stages of her story as related in Genesis: her inability to conceive, her entreaties to God for a child, and the joy she experiences at finally being granted that wish with the birth of her son, Isaac, in her old age. The composer has remarked on Sarah's special role in the Judeo-Christian heritage of the Western world: "She was the first woman to maintain unfaltering faith in the one, eternal God." Threads of a quasi-Hassidic tune appear throughout the piece, and the second movement is based on a contemporary neo-Hassidic tune that Silver learned in New York. The work's harmonic idiom is both tonal and nontonal—sometimes in juxtaposition, sometimes in a tension between the two, a duality that applies to many of the composer's works.

Born in 1913 to a German-Jewish family that converted to Roman Catholicism prior to his birth, Jan Meyerowitz studied in Berlin with Alexander Zemlinsky and in Rome with Ottorino Respighi and Alfredo Casella. After surviving most of World War II in the underground in France, he immigrated to the United States and became an assistant to Boris Goldovsky at Tanglewood. Meyerowitz's eclectic subjects and literary sources include American, English, French and biblical poetry, and range from Emily Dickinson and e.e. cummings to Rimbaud and Langston Hughes, with whom he collaborated on two operas, one dealing with racial tensions in the South and the other with the biblical heroine Esther, who is also the subject of the symphony heard on this Milken Archive disc (the two works are musically unrelated).

Midrash Esther (commentary on [The Book of] Esther), is a symphonic tone poem, premiered by Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, that is based on aspects of the story—as told in the biblical Book of Esther—of the imminent genocide of the Jews in the Persian Empire and their triumphant reprieve and victory over their tormentors. It is also a musical reflection on traditional exegeses and expansions upon that story and its characters, as found in the Talmud and other post-biblical commentaries. In the biblical narrative, Haman, the highest ranking official to the King of Persia, is besotted with envy and hatred for the Jewish people, which stems from the refusal of Mordecai, the Jewish leader and courtier, to bow down to him. Mordecai's adopted cousin, Esther, is the king's highly prized wife and queen, who has never revealed her Jewish identity. Waging a personal vendetta, Haman convinces the king that the Jews present a collective danger to the state, and persuades him to authorize complete annihilation of the Jewish population on a day he has chosen by lots. Esther intercedes for her people by revealing her Jewish identity to her husband; when it is discovered that Mordecai once saved the king's life by exposing a regicidal plot, the king turns on Haman in disgust and orders him to be hanged on the gallows originally constructed for Mordecai. The Jews are allowed to engage their enemies on the same day that Haman chose for the Jewish mass murder, resulting in their decisive victory.

The first of the symphony's four movements, a solemn introduction to the story, evokes the imminent danger to the Jews amid impending forces of evil. The second movement, Haman, contains frenzied passages reflecting Haman's raw hatred and rage. Esther and Ahasuerus, the adagio that follows, is at once a contemplative lament and a representation of Esther's heroic poise. The finale, entitled Purim, refers to the annual joyous Jewish festival that is celebrated to commemorate averting the catastrophe and the Jewish triumph, which in universal terms might also be interpreted as a triumph of justice over tyranny.