Seventy years after the establishment of the State of Israel, Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) leads a celebratory one-night-only event honoring the Jewish heritage of Mahler and Mendelssohn, contemporary pioneer Avner Dorman, and that of his own family, The Thomashefskys. Regarded by many as the finest concerto written for any instrument, Felix Mendelssohn’s romantic masterpiece is a showstopper in the hands of award-winning Israeli violinist Itamar Zorman. Mahler’s symphonies are one of MTT’s specialties and he led a performance of the First Symphony in Tel Aviv during NWS’s 1995 tour. They revisit the Titan’s first movement in what is MTT’s only symphonic Mahler offering this season—don’t miss it! Named after a popular Israeli dish, Avner Dorman’s ode to Jerusalem reflects a bustling and deeply religious city in a quintet for winds and piano. In a special treat, the evening starts with a circus-like overture from The Thomashefskys, MTT’s homage to his grandparents and Yiddish Theater royalty, Boris and Bessie.

 

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Program

Joseph Rumshinsky

Overture to Khantshe in amerike (1912)
Approximate duration: 6 minutes

Between 1880 and 1910, the Jewish population in the United States swelled from around 230,000 to over 2 million. These Eastern European and Russian immigrants brought with them a fledgling form of Yiddish musical theater that had sprung up in the Old World, and the scene soon took root in dedicated venues in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in tour stops around the country. Two of the biggest stars were Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, both originally from Ukraine; they met in an American theater, married and starred together for decades. (Bessie lived until 1962, and she passed along her musical gifts and memories to her grandson, Michael Tilson Thomas.)

Having trained to be a cantor, Joseph Rumshinsky began composing for the theater before he left home (in what is now Lithuania) to avoid being drafted into the Russian Imperial army. Boris Thomashefsky eventually helped him gain entry into New York’s Yiddish theater world, and Rumshinsky went on to write some of the Thomashefsky’s biggest hits, infusing the comic shows with the finest aspects of European operetta.

Rumshinsky composed Khantshe in amerike in 1912 as a vehicle for Bessie Thomashefsky, who played the title character: a sassy, cross-dressing, thieving suffragette. Some of the Overture’s marching music is indubitably American, pointing to the style carried forward by the next generation of American-born Jewish composers (including George Gershwin, who grew up in the shadow of the Yiddish theaters). Other parts of Rumshinsky’s Overture, including its big finish, lean on the tropes of traditional nigumin, the style of religious singing that also gave rise to Klezmer bands.

Avner Dorman

Jerusalem Mix (2007)
Approximate duration: 16 minutes

Following studies at Tel Aviv University in his native Israel, Avner Dorman came to the United States to pursue a doctorate degree at The Juilliard School, where he studied with John Corigliano. Dorman’s orchestral works have been performed around the globe, and his chamber music has been commissioned by such stars as Hilary Hahn and Gil Shaham. Dorman wrote the following note about Jerusalem Mix, a quintet for piano and winds commissioned by the Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival and the Chicago Chamber Musicians.

Jerusalem Mix takes its title from a popular Israeli dish made of an eclectic assortment of fried meats. The dish, much like the city of its origin, is a melting pot of flavors and characters—each preserving some of its unique characteristics while contributing to the whole. 

When I was first approached to write a woodwind and piano quintet for the 10th anniversary of the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, I knew I wanted to write a piece that would reflect the spirit of the festival and of the city of Jerusalem. 

As I started writing the piece, I discovered that the piano and woodwind quintet is a tricky ensemble as it embodies members of four different instrument families: the bassoon and oboe are both double-reed instruments; the clarinet is a single-reed instrument; the French horn is a brass instrument; and the piano is of the percussion family. I decided to use the diversity of this ensemble to mirror the diversity of Jerusalem. 

With this in mind I set out to write this piece as a collage of short scenes, each portraying one or more aspects of the city: 

I. Jerusalem Mix – portraying the busyness of the modern city. Musically, this movement is based on Armenian and Turkish folk dance-styles in which the length of the beats constantly varies. In the middle part of this movement, a prayer-like melody is introduced in the oboe, emulating its Middle-Eastern origins. 

II. The Wailing Wall – emulates the sound of a praying crowd. This movement is based on the characteristic sigh of the Jewish prayer, and it pays homage to the opening movement of Mordecai Seter’s oratorio Tikun Hatzot. 

III. Wedding March – a humorous movement that is first inspired by Hassidic music but gradually incorporates wedding music from Middle-Eastern Jewish traditions. As the wedding party reaches higher levels of ecstasy (and the guests are increasingly drunk) these different styles collide and collapse into one another. 

IV. Blast. 

V. Adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) – by hitting the strings of the piano with drumsticks, the pianist emulates the sound of a Kanun [a Middle-Eastern zither]. The prayers of the opening movement and of the Wailing Wall movement become the call to prayer of the muezzin. 

VI. Jerusalem Mix. 

All the movements are based on two simple melodic cells—one chromatic and the other made of a whole step. For me, the fact that these simple motives can lend themselves to the musical traditions of Christianity (Armenian dance), Islam and Judaism, expresses that on a deep cultural, musical and humane level, our cultures are closer than we realize. 

                              — Avner Dorman 

 

Felix Mendelssohn

Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64 (1844)
Approximate duration: 27 minutes

Felix Mendelssohn, the grandson of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the son of a prominent banker, was afforded every opportunity to develop his considerable musical talents. As a teenager in Berlin, when he wasn’t composing or mounting performances in his family’s private theater, he gathered to play chamber music with other talented youngsters, including Ferdinand David, a virtuoso violinist one year his junior. The two budding stars remained lifelong friends and collaborators.

When Mendelssohn became Music Director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835, he invited David to join the orchestra as concertmaster. “I’d like to write a violin concerto for you next winter,” Mendelssohn went on to suggest in 1838. “One in E-minor sticks in my head, the beginning of which will not leave me in peace.”

Mendelssohn waited until the summer of 1844 to flesh out the Concerto, a process that involved extensive correspondence with David about advanced violin technique. This impeccable Concerto turned out to be the last orchestral score that Mendelssohn completed; two years after its 1845 premiere in Leipzig, he died following a series of strokes.

Some of the Concerto’s most magical moments are those that defy conventional responsibilities, like when the violin launches immediately into the brooding first theme. Instead of a big flourish at the end of the cadenza (which is placed earlier than would be expected), the violin simply continues its ghostly arpeggios while the orchestra brings back the main melody.

A single held note from a bassoon links the first movement to the second, which blooms into an expressive aria for the violinist. As the slow movement recedes, a halting transition builds anticipation and points the Concerto toward its sunny conclusion in E-major. As a contrast to the flirty main theme, a regal secondary theme injects new grandeur and gravitas. It is fitting that this last big tune reworks the rhythms and intervals of the violin’s initial melody, such that an idea that first appeared in the Concerto as a lonely question returns transformed into a communal affirmation.

 

Gustav Mahler

Symphony No. 1 in D major (1884-88; revised 1894)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes

Gustav Mahler was born into a German-speaking, upwardly mobile Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic. He focused on composition as a student at the Vienna Conservatory, but from the time he directed his first opera at 21, he was bound for a career that involved him holding a conductor’s baton more often than a composer’s quill. In 1897 he ascended to the most influential podium in Europe, becoming director of the Vienna Court Opera; it was also the year he converted to Catholicism, to get around the opera’s prohibition on hiring a Jewish leader.

Mahler focused his limited composing time on songs and symphonies, with significant cross-pollination between the two genres. His First Symphony developed particularly slowly, beginning in 1884, when he was working in Kassel, Germany. Having become infatuated with a soprano in the choir he led, Mahler wrote her love poems, and he set some to music in the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), including melodies he later folded into the First Symphony. The piece remained unfinished during Mahler’s brief tenure in Prague, and it progressed as far as a piano score by early 1888, when he resigned from an even more prominent position in Leipzig. The 28-year-old went on to head the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest, and before year’s end he had completed the orchestration of his symphonic debut.

Mahler conducted the first performance of the “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts” (as he initially titled it) in Budapest in November of 1889. It confounded critics, especially the second part with its mix of grotesque parody and raw power, leading Mahler to shelve the score temporarily. After moving on to yet another conducting job in Hamburg, he brought the Symphony back for a second performance in 1893, with an expanded wind section and a new title: Titan, a Tone Poem in Symphony Form. Further revisions added more woodwinds and trimmed out the slow Blumine movement, bringing the score to the form in which it was published in 1899 as the Symphony No. 1. By then Mahler had removed the Titan title, but it continues to stick as a nickname.

The Symphony begins with the mystical resonance of the note “A” spread across the full range of the strings, joined by a slow motive of descending intervals. Mahler’s 1893 program described this movement as “the awakening of Nature from the long sleep of winter,” an association supported by pastoral birdcalls and distant fanfares, as if from a hunting party. Besides the naturalistic tone painting, Mahler’s opening pays homage to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which likewise begins with a sustained “A” and motives based on similar descending intervals. 

-- Copyright © 2018 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.

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