"Love is in the Airs" - the Carmel Quartet and Cecila Ensemble perform works on the subject of love from madigals of William Byrd to Eric Whitacre's "Five Hebrew Love Songs"

 

Photo: Yoel Levy

The Carmel Quartet's recent concert was very different from past events of its "Strings and More" series. In "Love is in the Airs", a program on the subject of love, the Carmel Quartet (established 2000) hosted the Cecilia Ensemble (music director: Guy Pelc). Replacing Prof. Yoel Greenberg (Carmel Quartet director/violist) and 1st violinist Rachel Ringelstein, we heard Matan Dagan (1st violin) and Shuli Waterman (viola) alongside Carmel Quartet members Tali Goldberg (violin) and Tami Waterman ('cello). Established by Naomi Faran (Moran Choirs conductor/musical director) the Cecilia Ensemble, an octet of outstanding soloists, serves as the professional representative ensemble of the Moran Choirs. "Love is in the Airs" was the Cecilia Ensemble's first collaboration with the Carmel Quartet. This writer attended the concert at the Jerusalem Music Centre, Mishkenot Sha'ananim on March 4th, 2025.

 

Opening the program, the Cecilia Ensemble members performed four a-cappella songs, commencing with a dynamic, ebullient performance of one of William Byrd's few secular pieces - "This sweet and merry month of May" - the Italianate madrigal's text reflecting the accepted English practice of praising Elizabeth I. This was followed by Byrd's "Lullaby, my sweet little baby", the ensemble highlighting Byrd's smooth flow of lush harmonies. Indeed tender, but with the balance a little heavy on the part of the sopranos. Then to two madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi. The quintet performing "A un giro sol de begl'occhi" (At a single glance of those beautiful eyes) led the listener from the realm of idyllic love as mirrored in nature, to sadness and on to vehement expression of love's cruelty, the singers highlighting Monteverdi's wonderful word-painting (madrigalism) and dissonances. Following that, the rich, serene nature scene of "Ecco mormorar l'onde" (Now the waves murmur) offered consolation to "each burnt-out heart". 

 

In 1996, Eric Whitacre (b.1971, USA) composed his "Five Hebrew Love Songs" to poems by singer/actress Hila Plitmann (b.1974, Israel), who would later become his wife. Originally written for soprano solo, piano and violin, the small poems (referred to by Whitacre as "postcards") take shape as a musical suite, each song, each, at the same time, remaining a single performable unit. In 2001, Whitacre arranged the songs for SATB chorus and string quartet, which was the setting performed at the Jerusalem concert. Following "A Picture", performed by the women singers, delicately depicting the love inside a person's heart, we heard "Light Bride", alternating between sections sung by male voices and contrasting vivid, unrestrained and dancelike sections sung by the women, these sections embellished with a touch of percussion. The third song, "Mostly", is characterized by its soprano solo (Lotem Taub) and by ascending and descending scales suggesting the idea of roof and sky as the subtle distance between two lovers. In "What Snow!", players and singers give expression to Whitacre's marvellous winter canvas, the violins evoking the pristine snow scene with flageolets, the score's ravishing clusters describing snowflakes. The bells sounding at the beginning of the song represent the exact pitches of bells the couple heard each morning from a nearby cathedral in Germany. An exceptional tableau and beautifully performed! The fifth song "Tenderness", sensuous, clement and oriental in flavour, concludes the suite, a work highlighting Whitacre's fine, expressive writing for both voices and instruments. 

 

From the freehearted, plainspoken approach to fresh love in Whitacre's "Five Hebrew Love Songs" to the elusive, mystical quality of British composer Gustav Holst's "Seven Part Songs" Op.44, set to poems of  English poet laureate Robert Bridges and scored for three-part women's chorus, strings and solo soprano. With the solo sections shared among the singers, we were presented with a profound, detailed reading of the pieces, the artists contending well with Holst's later choral compositional style and his highly personal brand of complex modal harmony. Singers (and players!) engaged in the complexities and beauty of the verbal texts with a sense of personal involvement. From the first song, "Say who is this?", the viola drone endorsing its eerie, bleak content, the songs challenge the listener to ponder each text and contemplate the many aspects of love presented here. In "When first we met," its sophisticated canonic interplay of vocal and orchestral forces emerging both alluring and disturbing, we learn that love is "so hard a master". Inspirited by a zesty ostinato, "Sorrow and Joy", on the other hand, offers a few home truths and advice on managing love and presented with the wink of an eye; whereas the homophonic, delicate and warmly expressive miniature "Love on my heart from heaven fell" (solo: Tom Ben Ishai) presents love as an idyllic state. Setting the scene with a soprano solo (Lotem Taub), supported by a cold, ghostly pedal in the first violin, the final song, "Assemble all ye maidens," by far the longest of the set, takes a dramatic approach to the poem describing a lady who died for love. A masterpiece, it represents the culmination of Holst’s mature art as a choral composer. One of Holst’s most profound compositions, it reflects the composer’s interest in the supernatural. 

 

Despite achieving great professional success, it seems Johannes Brahms remained unlucky in love. Involved in a number of romantic relationships throughout his lifetime, he is believed to have also developed feelings for Robert and Clara Schumann’s daughter Julie. Indeed, Brahms completed his Liebeslieder Walzer, Op. 52 in 1869, the year her engagement was announced. Light and unpretentious, the dances in Ländler style were designed for the enjoyment of talented amateurs rather than for concert artists, the eighteen songs representing two musical trends of the 1800s - dances to be played by piano duet and vocal pieces on the subject of love. To this end, Brahms selected verses from Georg Friedrich Daumer’s "Polydora", an 1855 German anthology of folk song texts from many countries. The poems Brahms chose comment on various aspects of love: some are set to longer, more serious texts, while others read like terse proverbs. Enter two distinctive Israeli musical figures - pianist, music theorist, and award-winning theatre composer Yuval Shapira and pianist/ accompanist, vocal coach, lecturer and translator Dr. Ido Ariel. Shapira's desire to re-score Brahms' piano role (so arresting in piano style and beauty that the composer arranged it for piano 4 hands without voices in 1875) had me worrying I might be hankering for that Brahmsian pianistic sumptuousness and poesy throughout the performance. But no! Shapira's arrangement offered much interest and individual expression to the string parts, both team-wise and individually, not losing sight of the composer's expressive use of melody, imaginative harmonies and counterpoint, or of the unique (experimental!) way in which Brahms controls the rhythmic and metric flow to suit each of these miniatures.  Ariel's sharp-witted translation of the songs is faithful to Daumer's original German - no less piquant, no less whimsical, no less delightsome - as the Hebrew words weave themselves naturally and effortlessly through and around Brahms' melodic course! Instrumentalists and singers were clearly savouring every verbal- and musical gesture of Brahms' multifarious lexicon of love…as was the audience.