Jewish Sightseeing HomePage Jewish Sightseeing
  2006-05-16 Terezin music—Zina Schiff
 
. Jerry Levens

 
 		  


Words and Music
'Terezin' concert opens new
vistas on the musical experience 

Jewishsightseeing.com, May 16, 2006

 
By Jerry Levens

LA JOLLA, Calif.—Zina Schiff’s recital  Monday evening, May 15,  at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center officially opened the San Diego Jewish Music Festival for 2006. The evening was a beautiful and meaningful musical event, which this writer thoroughly enjoyed. 

Throughout the performance, I felt that Schiff as well as Mary Barranger, pianist for the San Diego Symphony, played with sensitivity, warmth and an understanding of the music’s content.  Schiff as usual displayed the precision, accuracy and virtuosity of her mentor, Jascha Heifetz.     

It was decidedly different from the countless other musical evenings I have enjoyed over the years. It was more a musical awakening in the sense that it opened a musical window, which I had not looked through before:  music which had been created and performed during the Holocaust in a concentration camp. 

The program, "Music Played in Terezin," included two selections from Paul Kirman's Ancient Hebrew Airs, and also presented a short  Serenata composed by Robert Dauber, a young man of 21 who died in the camp two years later, 

Kirman, along with other composers and artists whose names I now know, created, performed and died in this most inhospitable of environments. Being a classically trained pianist and novice
  

Rehearsal—Violinist Zina Schiff and pianist Mary
Barranger rehearse on stage at Lawrence Family JCC

composer in my youth (so very long ago) I had a very difficult time imagining myself in these circumstances and how I would function.  These thoughts reoccurred to me throughout the evening and still do.  

The other two composers on the program, Beethoven and Bloch, I know quite well. I even recall practicing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, so I could perform with a young and attractive violinist I had met while attending music school in New York City. 

It is a very challenging composition to play and, as Schiff commented, is actually a concerto for piano and either violin or viola, in its structure.  From the latter half of the 18th century to well into the 20th   the sonata form was a way of composing music in a particular key system (as in keys of C, B, E-flat, F-sharp) so as to derive a large variety of musical ideas (themes, tunes, variations etc.) in a single movement.  

The concerto, on the other hand, I think of as a discussion or a series of questions and answers among the instruments.  Beethoven, in his early piano concertos with which I am more familiar, allowed the lead performer, the pianist, to have the last word by the use of a cadenza. This is a segment in either the first or the last movement where the artist could improvise. Granted, there were “rules” to follow, but one was allowed to “show off” with a display of virtuosity and bravura.

Ernest Bloch’s musical output, for the most part, possessed a decidedly "Jewish sound" : tonalities, which Itzhak Perlman once described as having a kuretcht or tear.  During my years in New York, I often heard this type of music, which included klezmer music, described as Jewish Soul Music.  I later discovered a connection, one of the seven Greek modes called the Phrygian mode: the mode of supplication.  Bloch's most characteristic Jewish compositions are Baal Shem, for violin and piano (later Orchestra), Schelomo, for cello and orchestra, and the evening's offering of the Suite Hebraique.

  The San Die