JEWISH MUSIC REVIVED
Semer Ensemble performs lost works
In Berlin in the 1930s, Jewish musicians made vibrant music, from pop songs, folk songs and cabaret fare in a variety of languages to cantorial music to light opera and more. Their artistry flourished even as the Nazis during their rise to power clamped down on the musicians’ opportunities to perform.
For five years, Berlin bookstore owner Hirsch Lewin even ran a record label called Semer that was dedicated to the eclectic output of Jewish musicians, and Lewin created scores of albums on fragile 78 rpm shellac discs.
But almost exactly 79 years ago, during the Germany-wide pogrom known as Kristallnacht on Nov. 9, 1938, when Nazi paramilitary and other attackers ransacked Jewish homes, hospitals, schools and businesses, Lewin’s business was among the thousands that were demolished.
All of the music Lewin had preserved was thought lost — and so it was, for more than 60 years.
Thanks to a German amateur musicologist’s dogged labour of love that involved scouring the globe for Semer label 78s, the music found on them can be heard once again. What’s more, the Semer Ensemble, a group consisting primarily of Berlin musicians, performs their interpretations of recovered songs.
That group performs Thursday night, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, in Southminster United Church as part of a six-date tour of Canada and the U.S.
Alan Bern, the ensemble’s director and pianist, says his project is meant to be celebratory, despite the tragic circumstances behind it.
“The overriding atmosphere of the program is not mourning,” says Bern, who is American-born and who moved to Berlin in 1987.
“The singing is about love affairs and jukeboxes and strippers,” he says. Jewish musicians in Berlin in the 1930s “were doing their damnedest to live a normal life in the middle of what was going on, in the middle of the growing Nazi terror. The last thing that we want to do is cover up their lives in a big black shroud of death. No way. I want them to come through as living people.”
Also visiting Ottawa this month in connection with the project will be Rainer Lotz, the German musicologist responsible for rescuing the Semer label’s music from oblivion.
From 1992 to 2001, Lotz who had been a mechanical engineer, political scientist and economist as well as a passionate record collector, took it upon himself to gather what he could of the Semer label’s output.
“It was just intensive research, excellent international links, networking, and plain good luck,” says Lotz, 80. “Everything was fronted from my own pocket ... I’m well-todo,” he added. “It was just a work of love and honour.”
To begin, Lotz studied old newspapers, advertisements and other documents to compile a near-complete list of the Semer label’s catalogue. Then he cast the net widely to find copies of those recordings.
“I found records in the U.S., in Israel, in Australia, in the U.K., in all sorts of places,” Lotz says. Some of the artifacts he retrieved included a terribly made cassette recording of a Semer original, a recording made of cardboard, and shards of broken shellac albums that had to be pieced together.
In 2002, the Bear Family label released a box set of 11 CDs and one DVD that presented the bulk of the Semer’s label catalogue, recovered by Lotz and digitally restored. The set’s title, Vorbei: Beyond Recall, is taken from a song sung by the cantor Israel Bakon, whose singing still affects Lotz deeply, even though he’s an atheist.
“His performances are of such enormous musicality,” Lotz says.
“There’s so much religious belief put into it and he had such a beautiful voice and he was improvising like any jazz musician, really. Each time I listen to him I get goose pimples on my arm. My hair stands up. Beautiful music!”
A decade after Lotz’s discoveries were reissued, the Jewish Museum in Berlin commissioned Bern to create arrangements of some of its music, and the Semer Ensemble was born.
After selecting the material to be performed, Bern set to work transcribing and arranging.
“When I really spent time with those recordings, I really felt like the pianists and the singers, they were stepping out through the recordings and I was getting to know them personally,” Bern says.
“It was a very deep experience ... the whole thing was like this incredibly intense dream of getting to know the music and knowing the people who were doing it.”
Bern says that his group’s inaugural concert in Berlin was especially moving because in the audience was Lewin’s son, who was still alive and living in Israel.
Bern says that later, he was able to visit the house where the Lewin family lived, as well as the room where untold Semer records had been kept and were eventually destroyed.
Yet, despite all the history bound up in his project, Bern says his ensemble’s goal is not to simply reproduce the lost music.
“We’re free to do some of them as they originally sounded, but in the end, we’re making an artistic statement,” he says. “Our work is not a documentary performance.”
The music should be as excellent as the story is interesting, Bern says.
“We don’t want to coast along on an interesting story. We want to do the story justice and we want to do the people justice. They were artists, and so I think that one of the most important ways to honour them as artists is to make compelling art now.
“Amazingly, we get deeper into the music every time we play it.” Bern says.
“We understand it better and it becomes more ours when we play it. I would like to imagine if one of the original musicians heard our program, that they would love what they’re hearing.” phum@postmedia.com Twitter.com/peterhum