The Israel Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra opens its 47th season with two new works of Israeli composers

Composer Yitzhak Yedid (photo:Alan Shaw)

    The  Israel Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra recently opened its 47th concert season with “The Great Opening”, eight concerts performed throughout Israel. This writer attended the festive event on November 1st in the Recanati Auditorium of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Conducted by the orchestra’s musical director, Swedish trombonist, conductor and composer Christian Lindberg, who also spoke briefly about each work, the concert was the first of the new season’s globe-trotting theme of “North-South-East-West”. The opening concert  featured alto Nitzan Alon, tenor Tal Koch and the Israeli Vocal Ensemble (music director: Yuval Benozer).The NKO’s house conductor,  Shmuel Elbaz, was present at the event, meeting and chatting with audience members in the foyer over a glass of wine.

      The “North-South-East-West” theme promises programming of great variety and daring, and this  concert was no exception. The event opened with Johannes Brahms’ Rhapsody for alto, men’s choir and orchestra op.53 (1869), referred to by Lindberg as “one of the most beautiful love songs ever written”. The work represents Brahms’ infatuation not for Clara Schumann but for Julie, Clara and Robert Schumann’s daughter; it was composed on the news of her engagement. The composer wrote the solo for contralto, his favourite voice. From the work’s very opening sounds, Israeli-born alto Nitzan Alon, today a soloist with the Israeli Opera, drew the audience into the mood piece, giving an intense and profound performance, her singing easeful, her vocal timbre rich and warm in all registers. Alon’s substantial voice contended well with the orchestra. She gave expression to the work’s innate sadness and the mounting anguish of the first two verses (both in C-minor), with the mood mellowing into a glow of hope in the third verse (now in C-major) as she was joined by the men’s choir.

Remaining in the West, but moving northwards to Finland, we heard the Israeli premiere of Jean ibelius’ Symphony No.3 in C major op.52. Begun in 1904, the work was premiered in Helsinki in 1907 under the baton of the composer himself. Lindberg spoke of the Finns’ great belief in nature, and the listener might certainly have sensed its  darkness, moving into the midnight sun and of the life-affirming powers of nature as referred to by the conductor. Symphony No.3, almost neo-Classical in concept, is more restrained than its two antecedents; still, the musical canvas, coloured with folk music associations, is exceptionally rich, from the ‘cellos and basses’ opening theme of the first movement, robust in melodic contour and rhythms, to the Nordic, bittersweet character of the second movement, to the soaring tutti and exhilarance of the final movement, in which a hymn-like melody rises up in the low strings. This is fine orchestral fare. The NKO’s playing was well coordinated, vibrant, incisive and dedicated. Such a work can only benefit  from the fine standard of the NKO’s wind players, with  woodwind utterances adding enjoyment and interest to what could only be termed as a lush, buoyant orchestral sound.   In a unique project to promote works of student-composers, of the Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra has invited three students of the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music (Tel Aviv) and three from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance to each compose a three-minute-long orchestral piece. The audience will hear one at each of this season’s concerts and will then vote for which it believes to be the best. Born in 1987, Ido Isak Romano is a masters student at the Jerusalem Academy of Music. His contemporary musical language is influenced by western classical music, electronic music, jazz and even Turkish music. We heard  his symphonic prelude “Elevations” (2017), a work inviting the listener to traverse different strata “mountains,the ground, oceans etc.” through his “integration of the various instrumental registers and textures”, in the composer’s words, “these creating new imaginary possibilities, enabling the listener to personally experience moving between these regions…” Romano’s orchestration is vivid, bristling with shimmering, dissonant screens of sound, clashes, breathy effects, slow microtonal ‘cello glissandi and timpani glissandi produced by the use of friction mallets, these echoed by the double basses, his forthright soundscape punctuated by a recurring, unrelenting and strong single beat of sound. A celebration of exuberance and orchestral colour, Romano’s piece seems to suggest that he has much more to say than is possible in a three-minute miniature.   Moving east, we heard  another new work by an Israeli composer. Yitzhak Yedid (b.1971), today living in Australia, where he lectures at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University. Commissioned by Maestro Lindberg and the Israel Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra,“Blessings and Curses” (2017), a work of one movement, takes its inspiration from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place holy to both Jews and Muslims as well as being a site fraught with conflict, vulnerability and tension, as is obvious from the title of the piece. Yedid’s writing is characterized by its inclusion of a wide spectrum of styles, textures and colours, reflecting the new and the ancient, in which his practical knowledge of the elements of Arabic music, jazz and western classical music join to form his own coherent musical style. Scored for chamber orchestra, “Blessings and Curses” is composed of 20 sections played in unbroken sequence, into which Yedid articulately weaves elements of eastern Jewish- and Arabic music with those of avant-garde western music, creating a canvas bristling with life, whose message is both tense and urgent. The music’s sarcastic undertone speaks of the unsolved political and social complexities represented by the Temple Mount. The work’s compositional writing is also complex, challenging the players to do justice to its multi-layered rhythmic structures. Lindberg and the NKO gave this fascinating and thought-provoking piece an exciting and finely coordinated reading.   With the Gloria from Giacomo Puccini’s “Messa di Gloria”, the concert concluded in the south. Puccini composed the Mass, scored for orchestra, four-part choir and tenor and baritone soloists, as his graduation exercise from the Istituto Musicale Pacini. Its first performance was in Lucca on July 12, 1880. Puccini never published the full manuscript of the Mass, and although it was well received when composed, it was not performed again until 1952 (first in Chicago and then in Naples). The Gloria, a veritable tour-de-force, with its profuse rhythmic energy, soaring melodies and emotional gestures, seemingly mixing at least as much of the profane (overtly operatic in style, in fact) as with the sacred, is a piece of great variety. Tenor, composer and actor Tal Koch gave an engaging rendering of the dramatic “Gratias agimus” solo, his singing suitably Italianate in timbre and temperament.  The Israeli Vocal Ensemble singers presented the Gloria’s various moods and textures with clarity and freshness, their polished performance bringing out Puccini’s flair for storytelling and the piece’s joyful moments (opera chorus fare!) but remaining within the boundaries of  good taste. Maestro Lindberg’s energy and enthusiasm added effervescence to the season’s opening concert, his informal, genial manner bringing artists and audience together in a program of interest and variety. style="