ISRAELI CHAMBER PROJECT PERFORMS JEWISH VOICES
The Calgary Pro Musica chamber music series continued Sunday and Monday with a pair of concerts featuring the Israeli Chamber Project. This group, giving its first Calgary performances, is in some ways similar to the Lincoln Centre Chamber Players, a fixture of this series.
Like the Lincoln Centre group, the Israeli Chamber Project features a flexible group of players, expanding slightly beyond such established groupings such as the piano trio or the string quartet.
In this instance, the performing group consisted of a string quartet, a pianist and a clarinetist. In various combinations they provided an enjoyable evening of music making, fascinating both for the high overall quality of the playing and for the originality of the program.
The members of the group have connections both to North America and to Israel.
While they perform a wide range of concert music of all kinds, they have a special commitment to music that relates to Jewish traditions, culture and to Israel more generally. This was particularly the case with this concert, which consisted entirely of music by Jewish composers, both past and present. The concert was called Jewish Voices.
Not one of the pieces performed could be called a mainstream work, but as one of the performers commented, each piece is in its own way a jewel.
Taken all together the music was of the high quality, even as the works themselves were virtually unknown to a conventional audience.
The program opened with Souvenirs de Voyage, a work by Bernard Hermann, familiar to most as the composer for several well-known Hitchcock films, including Psycho.
This work, however, was of English pastoral character, reflective of the anglophilic Hermann of the later years. A reflective piece with a prominent part for the clarinet, it was beautifully executed, with some excellent playing by Tibi Cziger on the clarinet. The strings provided a gentle haze, the diffuse quality of the melodies matched by the evocative string sound.
The following two works were much more modern in style and included Private Game by the well-known, and much admired, Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran, as well as the Sextet version of Aaron Copland’s Short Symphony.
This was very comfortable ground by the ensemble, the spiky sound tight and clear, and the complex rhythms of the Copland accurately executed.
If one had to pick the most impressive performance of the night it would have been either the Copland or the final quintet by Karl Goldmark.
While Goldmark’s name is known to music-lovers, very little of his music is actually heard in concert. This quintet, written at the tender age of 84, proved to be a work of energy and vigour, fully worthy to be the featured work on the program.
It was performed with real conviction in this instance, the rich piano writing clearly delivered by Assaff Weisman, and the four strings providing strong, virile accounts of the string lines.