The Sounding Jerusalem Festival concludes with a concert of oriental instrumental and vocal music directed by Mahran Morab. Vocal soloist - Lamar Mireb

 

Mahran Moreb (Courtesy Sounding Jerusalem 2023)

Lamar Mireb (Courtesy Sounding Jerusalem 2023)

The evening of August 10th was balmy, ideal for a zesty concert in the medieval courtyard of the Lutheran Redeemer Church in Jerusalem's Old City, a magical venue offering fine acoustics and enhanced by lush foliage descending from the upper balconies. The event was the final concert of the 2023 Sounding Jerusalem Festival. The Right Rev. Joachim Lenz (Redeemer Church) opened the event, mentioning the Redeemer Church as being in the heart of the Jerusalem soundscape, the sounds heard there evident of the three religions represented in close proximity. He referred to the concert of local oriental music as "music of the land". Sounding Jerusalem founder and director Austrian 'cellist Erich Oskar Hutter spoke of the intensive week of festival concerts as having been a "beautiful journey", creating a "musical family" and always attracting a good mix of people. He stressed the importance of the discussions following each concert. Huetter thanked all the festival's partners, both local and from overseas. He alluded to the various concert venues of this year's festival as "special, hidden, spiritual places", settings that give rise to magical moments.

 

The closing concert mostly comprised works by composer/arranger and educationalist Mahran Moreb - instrumental pieces, classical Arabic songs, with some influence of Iraqi and Syrian folklore and the occasional reference to western-style music - performed by 13 musicians, including a small chorus and the ensemble of instrumentalists playing bowed-, plucked-, percussion instruments and keyboard, with vocalist Lamar Mireb presenting the songs. All on stage were led by Mahran Moreb himself on qanun (a type of large zither with a thin trapezoidal soundboard, having a distinctive, melodramatic timbre). Explaining the program, Moreb (with double bass player Eleni Mustaklem translating his words into English) spoke of the concert as being a "musical journey", many of the songs speaking of love (and its complications) and the fleeting nature of life.    

 

With no further ado, the ensemble launched into the music, sweeping the audience into its candid, highly-coloured, robustly-textured and forthright presentation, its accessible and sensitively-shaped melodic content and its compelling, foot-tapping rhythms. Her voice stable, powerful and well anchored, Lamar Mireb's singing of the songs was convincing and passionate. Although we non-Arabic speakers were at a slight disadvantage as to the content of the vocal material, Mireb, supported by the small chorus of singers, conveyed the emotions to the audience. Under the watchful eye of Moreb, the artists presented us with an evening of highly polished performance. Most delectable were the several instrumental solos performed by ensemble members and by Moreb himself, these wonderful moments highlighting the individual players' fine musicianship, virtuosity and invention.

 

Sounding Jerusalem 2023 signed out on a high note!

Photo: Peter Tilley

The 2023 Sounding Jerusalem Festival opens at the Redeemer Church (Jerusalem) with a concert of works of Richard Strauss, Gideon Klein and Tchaikovsky

Erich Oskar Huetter (trashPHOTOGRAPHY)

 

Taking place on August 3rd at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem's Old City, "Capriccio" launched the 2023 Sounding Jerusalem Festival with exhilaration, creating interest in events in the week to follow. Sounding Jerusalem was established in 2006 by Austrian 'cellist Erich Oskar, who continues to direct the annual festival. The artists include established musicians as well as gifted younger players, together exploring a diverse range of European classical repertoire, but also jazz and local ethnic music. The Right Rev. Joachim Lenz (Redeemer Church) opened the event by reminding the audience in these turbulent times that beautiful music in beautiful places brings people together. Maestro Huetter added that it was an honour and a privilege to be back making music in Jerusalem.

 

Performing this concert were Austrian violinists Eszter Haffner and Johannes Meissl, violists Anna Brugger (Switzerland/Germany) and Patrick Jüdt (Switzerland) and 'cellists Matthias Johansen (Germany) and Erich Oskar Huetter. The program opened with the Sextet that forms the Overture to "Capriccio" (1942), Richard Strauss' last stage work, an opera on the subject of opera, dealing with the age-old question about the opera genre: which is more important, the words or the music? The Sextet is frequently heard as a stand-alone work; in fact, it was first performed before the premiere of the opera itself! Richard Strauss is writing in the post-Wagnerian late Romantic style of extended tonality. Binding the piece together is the recurring melodic motive announced by the 1st violin in the opening bars. Led manifestly by Meissl, the artists' playing of the Sextet was imaginative, fresh, lush and empathic, at times reflecting the score’s unsettled moods, as they probed the music's gestures and emotions with both involvement and subtlety. Their performance invited the audience to delight in the radiant brightness of tone, the silken luminosity inherent in Strauss’ six-string writing. 

 

We then heard Haffner, Brugger and Huetter in a performance of Gideon Klein's Trio for violin, viola and 'cello. Moravian-born Jewish pianist/composer/arranger/accompanist and repairer of instruments Gideon Klein was a pivotal figure in the cultural life of the Terezin prison camp and ghetto. The String Trio, his final composition (and probably the last major work to be composed by anyone in Terezín) was completed in October 1944, ten days before Klein's deportation to Auschwitz. He was murdered at age 25 in the Fürstengrube camp. Many of his compositions were entrusted to a fellow prisoner who survived, later to pass them onto Klein’s sister, pianist Eliška (Lisa) Kleinová. Vigorous and articulate, the Sounding Jerusalem artists' playing of the work highlighted Klein's harmonic sophistication and rhythmic dynamism, the brief outer movements emerging intense, vivid, fsounding in almost neoclassical transparency and brimming with lively rhythms and melodies evoking Czech folk dances. The players' committed and eloquent performance of the middle movement, a set of variations on "The Kneždub Tower", a folksong from Klein’s native Moravia (its text symbolically telling of a wild goose flying up into a high tower), presented a wide range of emotions - from deep sorrow to occasional moments of whimsy. Here was a fine opportunity to hear one of Klein's most ambitious, comprehensive and extraordinary pieces, a work that has remained central to the string trio repertoire.

 

Following his disastrous three-month marriage with a former student of the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky travelled to Italy, spending a winter in Florence to enjoy some peace of mind and to put thoughts on his own life into perspective. There, he worked on a draft of his opera "The Queen of Spades"; his ballet "The Sleeping Beauty" was being premiered there. With Eszter Haffner taking the 1st violin role, the opening Sounding Jerusalem concert concluded with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's spirited sextet "Souvenir de Florence" in D minor. Conceived in part during the composer's Florence sojourn, some of this last chamber music composition of his sings the praises of Italian lyricism, the  second movement, in partictular, on whose score the composer stipulated that the melody that has become referred to as the "Souvenir de Florence" theme should sound “sweet and singing”. Italianate but inescapably Russian, indeed, evoking much of the flavour of Slavic traditional music, this is a splendid and vivid concert piece. The artists gave it an ebullient and wholehearted rendition, addressing its sweeping phrases, finespun bel canto melodies and sensitively-shaped poignant tunes, its variety of string textures, its dialogues, driving rhythms, its sophisticated contrapuntal writing and (as Tchaikovsky mentioned in a letter to his brother) the proposition of juxtaposing “six independent and at the same time homogeneous voices".

 

It was an evening of fine festival fare and excellent musicianship.