SAFE AT HOME WITH "THE ORCHESTRA NOW"
The invitation was…well, inviting:
Carnegie Hall. Conductor Leon Botstein. An orchestra of young virtuosos. Playing the music of Jewish composers in exile.
Some of my favorite music, if not much of my favorite art, was created by Jewish artists in exile. In fact, if you think about it, most of the art created by Jews, A.D., has been created in exile.
Honestly, I prefer not to think about it.
It was only on the eve of the concert — I mean literally, the day of — that it dawned on me I had placed myself in some peril by accepting. Nothing that would stop me from attending, but it did make me a little schvitzy. Because the tragedy in Israel and Gaza has obviously rendered anything even tangentially touching upon the region a potential target for protest.
My opinions about this whole business are no one’s business but my own. My immediate concern was simply to get to this concert and return home in one piece.
Metal detectors and security pat-downs greeted me, not upon arrival in the Carnegie Hall lobby, but right out on 57th Street. This was not necessarily an unwelcome welcome. Open-air checkpoints are certainly ominous but they do make entry at least feel safer. More or less.
The concert itself, proved uneventful in any political sense, blessedly. Otherwise you no doubt would have read about it by now.
The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is the official name of Mr. Botstein’s ensemble; 60 young players from 13 different countries — Austria, Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Hungary, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the U.S. and Venezuela — drawn from leading conservatories like the Yale School of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Royal Academy of Music, the New England Conservatory of Music. Culled by Maestro Botstein for a masters program at Bard College (where he is also president), the young musicians of TŌN usually make their music up at Bard, in architect Frank Gehry’s famously undulating Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.
This night, it was Carnegie Hall.
The program’s Jewish composers in exile were all deceased, as it turned out. Each, while alive, had once fled the Nazis: Marcel Rubin. Walter Kaufmann. Josef Tal. Alexandre Tansman. Safely seated, I poured over their brief bios and pictured these Jewish composers on the run from hate in the 20th Century. Then, inexorably, I found myself imagining Jewish composers on the run from hate in the 21st Century, alongside Muslim composers on the run from hate. Imparting to the concert an immediacy beyond poignancy.
Vienna-born Marcel Rubin fled to France first, then on to Mexico, where he wrote his Symphony No. 4 between 1943 and 1945 as a musical exhumation of his own wartime traumas. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s ballad “Kinderkreuzzug 1939,” Rubin composed a symphonic horror show set to the march time, it sometimes sounded, of Ack-Ack guns.
The veritable-children of TŌN played his shattering music with preternatural slash and burn aplomb.
Walter Kaufmann ran from Czechoslovakia to Mumbai, India in 1934, fleeing the Nazis in a counter-intuitive direction. His initial encounters with Indian music were apparently incomprehensible to him and he set about studying India ragas systematically, slowly unlocking their mesmerizing beauty. For years he wrote for All India Radio, including a tune that was played at the dawn of every morning broadcast. He also became the young Zubin Mehta’s violin teacher.
Kaufmann’s Indian Symphony, written in 1943, proved so lushly melodic in an Easternized Western sense, that I found myself wondering whether Richard Rodgers was not aware of it when he sat down to write The King and I almost ten years later. A deeper vein of musical India ran through it via the frenetic rhythmic pulses of the piece, particularly in the finale, which, The Orchestra Now players delineated furiously and splendidly.
Josef Tal was born Josef Grünthal in the town of Pinne, in what was then the German empire but is today Poland. He grew up in Berlin but headed for Palestine with his family in 1934, where he became one of the patriarchs of Israeli art music, the composer of three operas in Hebrew, four in German, six symphonies, numerous concerti, string quartets and even electronic compositions.
Tal’s Exodus: Longing for a Homeland, written in 1941, whispered and roared with the textures of sand and wind in the desert. Epic in scale, its episodic score for orchestra and baritone (an excellent Noam Heinz) resounded with a desperate yearning that inescapably resonated with the yearnings of our own desperate moment. The Orchestra Now polyglot of players seemed to comprehend it innately.
Alexandre Tansman took me utterly by surprise. As his delicious Polish Rhapsody unfolded, an echoing sense of George Gershwin’s Cuban Rhapsody began gnawing at my ear. The blue landscape of Gershwin’s flatted fifths and Latinate syncopations —transported somehow to Poland — roiled Tansman’s Polish folk modes, dedicated: “To the defenders of Warsaw.” Written in 1941, upon Tansman’s arrival in the U.S. (having escaped Paris days ahead of the Nazis), Polish Rhapsody left me thinking of my favorite “Jewish composer in exile:” George Gershwin.
At Intermission, I Googled: “Tansman and Gershwin.”
Bingo.
They did know each other. In fact, they were friends, who probably met during a Tansman concert tour of the U.S. — Tansman was also a celebrated concert pianist apparently. They even attended the Yiddish theater together in New York and — Oh my God! — also escorted a visiting Maurice Ravel to the Savoy Ballroom! (This, according to Howard Pollack’s George Gershwin: His Life and Work. Google Searches are fine, but nothing surpasses the satisfaction of scanning a massive biography’s massive index for a needle in a haystack, and finding not only just what you’re looking for, but, after turning actual pages, something even better.)
Tansman and Gershwin also hung out in Paris together in 1928 during the Gershwin visit that resulted in “An American in Paris.” And Alexandre Tansman, I discovered when I got home, wrote the most exquisitely lovely, penetratingly Gershwin-esque musical tribute to his friend that I have ever heard: “In Memory of George Gershwin ‘1925’” You can hear it here.
Yes, I did make it home from Carnegie Hall; exhilarated, illuminated, haunted and, most gratefully, intact.
Who could ask for anything more?