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.