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| Alexander Tamir,Bracha Eden (Courtesy Eden-Tamir Music Center) |
A concert commemorating 20 years of Prof. Bracha Eden's passing took place at the Eden-Tamir Music Center, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, on May 19th, 2026. No venue could have been better suited to the event - the centre duo pianists Alexander Tamir and Bracha Eden founded in 1968 (originally, the Max Targ Music Center) which they directed, and in which they and many local artists performed. Set in tranquil, leafy surroundings, this unique music centre continues to serve as a busy hub for chamber music performance. Eden and Tamir met in 1951 as students of Prof. Alfred Schroeder, then to perform together for over 50 years as soloists with orchestras, in recitals, on television and radio, and in various festivals. They made their debut in Israel in 1954 and appeared in New York (1955) and Rome (1956), where they won the 1957 Vercelli Competition. Eden and Tamir taught as senior professors at the Rubin Academy of Music (today, the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.). During the 1990s they went to perform and teach in China, Russia and Poland and, in 1997, they became directors of the International Duo Piano Seminary.
Prof. Yoram Eden, Bracha Eden's son, opened
the event with some amusing reminiscences from the duo's performing
experiences. Dr. Dror Semmel, today artistic director of the Eden-Tamir Music
Center, was a student of Bracha Eden. He spoke of her as a musician and teacher
and of their close friendship, also making mention of the Eden-Tamir Piano
Duo's punctilious performance standards, characterized by both precision
and a sense of freedom.
Franz Schubert's oeuvre for four hands
formed a significant part of the Eden-Tamir Duo's repertoire. No other great
composer has written as many works for piano duet. The program opened with
Schubert's Fantasie in F minor D.940 for piano four hands (a favourite
item of the Eden-Tamir Duo's repertoire), here performed by the Jerusalem Piano
Duo (siblings Dror Semmel and Shir Semmel.) Indeed, making music with others
constituted a meaningful pastime among Schubert's circle of friends. With
the Fantasie in F minor D 940, however, Schubert completely leaves the
sphere of social gatherings and pedagogy in the final year of his life,
creating a work of almost symphonic form. This piece, its four linked sections
marked Allegro–Largo–Scherzo–Tempo 1, gave Schubert the structure upon which he
could showcase the sweep of potential the "Fantasie" concept offered
him and one that permitted him to apply non-standard transitions. The work was
dedicated to Karoline Esterházy, one of Schubert's summer students on the
Esterházy estates in Zseliz (1818,1824), the dedication possibly indicative of
a romantic attachment between teacher and student. Following the Jerusalem
Piano Duo's' elegiac delivery of the Fantasie's haunting opening, the
implacable second theme soon arriving to challenge it in giant blocks of sound,
the artists (Dror playing the primo, Shir the secondo) show the listener
through the work's rich canvas, one of wistful introspection, of moments
of dancelike verve and general spirit of bonhomie, of quicksilver changes of
mode (often alternating between major and minor in successive phrases) and
intensity, then to challenge with a commanding, defiant fugue. Each return to
the poetic first melody emerged more affective than previously, as the work
concluded with the uncompromisingly bleak tone of the closing bars, exceptional
to the works of Schubert. A carefully-detailed, personal and moving performance
of this monumental work.
Johannes Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes for piano four hands and vocal quartet
Op.52 was another work central to the Eden-Tamir Piano Duo's repertoire.
Moving from Hamburg to Vienna, Brahms was now writing a large body of music set
in more intimate forms, among those being the Liebeslieder Walzer,
composed in the common music-making style for domestic salons. The original
score calls for "piano four hands and voices ad libitum”. The texts of the
Liebeslieder are East European folk poems, translated into German by
Georg Friedrich Daumer. In a letter to his publisher, Brahms dismissed
his set of 18 Liebeslieder Walzer as “trifles”. Yet, despite their
popular appeal, their brevity, their characteristic rhythms, and their typical
pattern of 4-line texts in which each couplet is sung and then repeated, these
pieces are highly sophisticated. The miniature Lieder display a variety of
jolly- and light-hearted moods, of ironic, introspective, or sad feelings, some
incomplete in sentiment or unexplained, with Brahms' writing elegant, elaborate
and rich in word painting. Performing the collection were Shir Semmel and Dror
Semmel (piano), with vocal students from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music
(Tel Aviv University) - Karni Malloul (soprano), Shulamith Lvovsky
(mezzo-soprano), Nevo Weiner (tenor) and Tal Aharonovich (baritone). With the
pianists placed behind them and no conductor (a conductor only if performed by
a choir), this was no easy task for the young singers. Negotiating the
different emotions of each of the Liebeslieder's fleeting vignettes,
they joined the pianists in creating Brahms’ musical language, one intertwining
popular- and art music, in presenting its Romantic gestures, its charm and its
small dramas. In this quintessential Brahms work for "quick change
artists", the vocal ensembles were interspersed with some lovely
vocal solos. I believe Professors Eden and Tamir would have appreciated the
choice of vocal students for the performance.
Back to 1828, to the last year of
Schubert's much-too-brief life, when he composed his three last sonatas for
piano, these generally seen as the culmination of the composer's lifelong
occupation with the piano sonata genre. The Ein Kerem concert concluded with
Schubert's last sonata - Piano Sonata in B flat major D.960.
Towards the end of Bracha Eden's life, Dror Semmel talked to her about his
study of the sonata, but the opportunity of his playing it to her did not
eventuate. At the Jerusalem concert, Dror chose to perform it on the Eden-Tamir
Center's recently-acquired 1819 Graf fortepiano, a marvellous
instrument modelled by historic piano builder Paul McNulty (US) after
instruments played by Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. One of the towering masterpieces
not only of the solo piano genre, but of all musical repertoire, the D.960 is
an expansive composition. Schubert is thought to have performed it at least
once in his last months, but it was not published until more than a decade
after his death. From the exalted opening measures to those of the exuberant
ending gestures, Dror Semmel's performance of it on the fortepiano was
personally expressive and profound. Engaging the instrument's four pedals
in order to create different timbres, he juxtaposed the work's intense
aspects with its mysterious moments, highlighting Schubert's kaleidoscope of
gestures with carefully chiselled phrasing and discretely-poised timing. I
talked to him about playing the work on fortepiano. He believes that as modern
listeners and audiences, "we are compelled to hear those instruments in
comparison to the modern Steinway", adding that the distinctive action of
the fortepiano " transforms the core essence of this music into a
different realm of sound and expression. For example, there are many layers and
nuances of piano and pianissimo." From the almost heartbreaking
tenderness of the opening movement, to the remote, austere and poignant calm of
the Andante sostenuto, to the buoyant, humorous B-flat-major course of the
closing Allegro non troppo, Semmel combines the imagination and pianistic
colour of the past with scholarship of the present,
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