Tuesday, April 19, 2022

The Tel Aviv Wind Quintet performs works from 1893 to 2021 at the Jerusalem Music Centre's "7 at Seven" concert series

Roy Amotz,Nir Gavrieli,Itamar Leshem,Nadav Cohen,Danny Erdman (Courtesy TLVWQ)
 

Attending an event of the "Seven at 7" series of the Jerusalem Music Centre (Mishkenot Sha'ananim) for the first time, there was no mistaking that this subscription series, directed and presented by Prof. Ariel Hirschfeld, is a program with a difference. Alongside the wide repertoire of classical chamber music, the concerts might include jazz, Israeli songs or focus on one specific instrument. "Between Viennese Inebriation and Orchestrated Gefilte Fish" (certainly no conventional title for a concert) was performed by the Tel Aviv Wind Quintet on April 12th 2022.

 

Professor Ariel Hirschfeld, researcher and cultural critic, served as the head of the Faculty of Hebrew Literature of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 2008 to 2012, where he himself had studied Musicology and Hebrew Literature. He opened the evening's proceedings by expressing how happy he was to be hosting the Tel Aviv Wind Quintet, adding that, in the Classical period, there had been many small wind ensembles playing "Harmoniemusik" - a particular body of music written from c.1760-1837 - repertoire whose primary function was to provide social entertainment. Harmonie ensembles provided dinner- and after-dinner music for the emperor in Vienna, these ensembles also popular among the lower aristocracy and wealthy middle classes, circles keen to have their own in-house Harmonie. That being said, an appropriate work to open the concert was Viennese composer Alexander von Zemlinsky's "Humoresque". Talking about the composer and his originality, Hirschfeld feels that Zemlinsky's music is not well-known enough. The Tel Aviv Wind Quintet gave vivid expression to this short, sprightly and uplifting work, its light-heartedness and charm quite a contrast from the usual depth and darker themes explored in Zemlinsky's music.

 

Then, to two contemporary pieces for wind quintet. Israeli composer Moshe Zorman (b.1952) wrote his Suite (2021) for the TLVWQ, its stimulus being the isolation constraints dictated by the Corona pandemic. In fact, the second movement, titled "All in the Family", suggests a family argument (played out by Roy Amotz-flute and Danny Erdman-clarinet) taking place in the fraught reality of lockdown! Yet despite its tongue-in-cheek element, the work is a sophisticated and challenging piece of writing for wind quintet, alive with rhythmic interest, zestful textures and buoyancy, the third movement opening with a bittersweet waltz offering some solos, then to close with a dejected-sounding cluster. Prominent composer, conductor and pianist, Moshe Zorman has composed operas as well as some one hundred works for symphony orchestra, chamber groups and choirs.

 

There was no mistaking the genesis of "Kleztet" (2008) by French composer, conductor and scholar Jean-Philippe Calvin. Producing the work's bold canvas, the TLVWQ instrumentalists gave hearty, exuberant and rapid-fire expression to the Hassidic wedding dances woven throughout, also addressing the work's fragile touches of humour and moments of nostalgic, Jewish melancholy, all these elements set into a collage of fast-changing moods and textures. The players' joie-de-vivre was well conveyed to the audience in this entertaining concert piece. Until 2014 Calvin served as professor and research associate in Contemporary Music as well as the director and the founder of the Variable Geometry Contemporary Music Ensemble at the Royal College of Music (London), then becoming the Clive Marks research associate in Holocaust & Jewish Music studies at World ORT, focusing on "Music, Memory & The Holocaust - The Forgotten Music and the Songs of Sephardic Jews in Post-Ottoman Turkey." 

 

The only work on the program not originally scored for wind quintet was Antonin Dvořák's 1893 String Quartet in F major Op.96 (American), arranged for wind quintet by French oboist David Walter. As to the work inspired by summers spent in the hamlet of Spillville (USA) among Czech compatriots, where the composer was surrounded by nature and friends, there has been much discussion regarding how much or whether there is any American content in the music. Introducing the work, Prof. Hirschfeld claimed there was "nothing not Czech about the work". What is unquestionably American here, however, is a motif in the third movement, one inspired by the repeated call of the Scarlet Tanager, a native bird to evergreen forests in eastern North America. Comparison with the work's string qualities aside, Walter's brilliant transcription of the quartet was embraced wholeheartedly by the TLVWQ players, who brought to the fore the music's melodic freshness and underlying soulfulness with touching personal utterance, lyrical warmth, expressiveness and the vivid timbral mix offered by the wind ensemble constellation. 

 

The ensemble produced a concert of first-class, polished performance. For an encore, the TLVWQ performed Mordechai Rechtman's arrangement of the "Badinerie" from Bach's Suite in B minor for flute, strings and continuo, with Roy Amotz' performance of the flute solo convivial, dazzling and easeful.

 

The concert was followed by an informal discussion between audience and players over a glass of wine.

 

The Tel Aviv Wind Quintet: Roy Amotz-flute, Nir Gavrieli-oboe (guest player), Danny Erdman-clarinet, Itamar Leshem-horn, Nadav Cohen-bassoon.

 

 

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