The Gary Bertini Israel Chamber Choir (music director: Ronen Borshevsky) performs sacred works of J.S.Bach, J.A.Hasse and Mozart at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

 

 

It was "Masterpieces of the 18th Century" that concluded the 2025-2026 subscription series of the Gary Bertini Israel Chamber Choir (music director: Ronen Borshevsky). This writer attended the performance in the Recanati Auditorium of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art on July 7th, 2026. Soloists were Neta Flomen (soprano), Nitzan Alon (mezzo-soprano), Nevo Weiner (tenor) and Yoav Weiss (baritone). Established by Haggi Goren and Maestro Borshevsky in 2009, the Gary Bertini Choir, numbering some 26 singers, performs repertoire from Renaissance- to contemporary classical works, also folk music, music of Jewish- or Israeli content and world music. Joining them were members of the Israeli Chamber Ensemble.

 

The event opened with J.S.Bach's Cantata BWV 106 Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (God's time is the best time), also known as Actus Tragicus, a funeral piece composed in 1707, when the 22-year-old composer was employed as church organist in Mühlhausen.. One of Bach's earliest cantatas, its unusual instrumentation calls for two recorders, two violas da gamba and continuo section, vocal soloists and choir. Although not performing on period instruments, members of the Israeli Chamber Ensemble provided the soft-grained detail and comforting (sometimes almost heavenly) sound evoking the work's intimacy, intense expressiveness and meditation. From the quiet longing of the Sonatina, one of the loveliest, most soulful openings in any Bach cantata, recorder players Inbar Solomon and Leora Vinik welded the duet's extraordinary beauty and devotion, the recorder roles' sharp seconds and unisons possibly symbolising earthly suffering. As to the soloists, Nevo Weiner gave a richly resonant reading of the mournful Arioso; Nitzan Alon, her voice mellow and even in all registers, shaped the text's meaning throughout "In deine Hände" (Into your hands); Neta Flomin wove the proclamation of the coming of Jesus into "Es ist der alte Bund" (It is the ancient law) with gossamer-fine beauty and ease. With the recorders in unison propelling the music forward, Yoav Weiss, gave "Bestelle dein Haus" (Put your house in order) a sense of divine urging, his voice buoyant, avoiding the muscular approach taken by some singers in this aria. Performing one of the pinnacles of Bach’s sacred music with emotional restraint, delicacy, transparency and subtlety, Borshevsky, players, choir and soloists showed listeners through the work's phases, from fearful death to joyful afterlife, from worldly complacency into uncertainty and on into the light.

 

Based on Psalm 51 (Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love), Johann Adolf Hasse's Miserere in C minor was composed in 1735 for the Ospedale degli Incurabili, one of several institutions in Venice dedicated to caring for- and educating orphaned and abandoned children. Originally written for women’s choir, the Miserere was later revised by Hasse himself to include the more standard vocal ensemble of SATB, soloists and choir and a larger orchestra. He also added two final movements to the piece. The revised version was that performed at the Tel Aviv concert. The eight contrasting sections include arias, soloistic ensemble movements and choruses, the work's message expressing comfort, devotion, and mercy. Cast in a relatively compact structure, Hasse's musical language covers a broad stylistic and emotional range, bringing the dramatic flair of Neapolitan opera music to the penitent and pleading Miserere text. Setting the scene was the choir's majestic, clean and unmannered singing of the opening Miserere chorus. Solos, duets and ensembles followed, the solos and duets free of excessive vibrato. In the tranquil Libera me (Deliver me), recorder players Solomon and Vinik imitated and commented within the weave of Flomen and Alon's natural, unforced singing of the movement. Hasse spent much of his career as an opera composer in Dresden. His choral music is little known but, on the evidence of this performance, it is worth uncovering.  Borshevsky's rendition of the Miserere in C minor captured Hasse's refined juxtaposition of solemn grandeur and graceful beauty.

 

And to W.A.Mozart's Missa Credo in C major K.257, its title explaining the acclamations of “Credo” that constantly punctuate the so-named movement. Composed in Salzburg in 1776, this Mass is remarkable for its density of invention within the narrowest of confines, showing the 20-year-old Mozart's adherence to Count Hieronymus Colloredo’s preference for concise services. Even by the standards of the Salzburg church, however, this Mass is unusually eventful: jubilant ceremonial sonorities consist with sudden contrasts that feel almost operatic in their timing. Maestro Borshevsky addresses the work's wealth of beautiful melodies, its rhetorically vivid and structurally decisive style, its drama, its assertive energy and dynamic contrasts and the work's "vehemence" (with few exceptions), in which the music does not always support the words. (Indeed, with Mozart known to have been irreverent at times, might it be that the Credo Mass comes across as a work of largely secular defiance and independence?)  One fascinating feature of the work is the existence of two distinct choral bodies. For the solo singers, who generally function as a quartet, Mozart wrote in a filigreed and more ornamented manner than for the choir. The Tel Aviv performance offered much interest in the exchanges between- and separateness of the two choral groups. “Benedictus qui venit” (Blessed is he),  its exquisite writing providing introspective, meandering songfulness for the soloists, was moving (indeed, supportive of the words in every way!) Altogether, the singers were splendidly supported by the ICE's players, the instrumental score's chamber-music quality sometimes rising into almost symphonic proportions.