Alberto HEMSI (1898-1975)
Coplas Sefardies
Tehila Nini Goldstein (soprano)
Jascha Nemtsov (piano)
rec. 2017-2020, Saal 3, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin.
Sung texts and English translations included.
HÄNSSLER CLASSIC HC20039 [3 CDs: 215:05]
Some years before I first visited Spain, I had already developed an interest in the Jewish contribution to Spanish culture. While a postgraduate student, around 1969/70, I was asked to give some help to a Spanish student (of Jewish origins) who had come to Oxford to work on a comparative study of Cervantes and Shakespeare. We got on well and as I have usually found in the best teaching experiences, I learned at least as much, if not more, from him as he learned from me. Along with making my pleasure in Don Quixote much better informed, he made me tapes of Sephardic music performed by artists such as Yehoran Gaon and Isak Maçoro (I have since gone on to listen to more recent interpreters such as Yasmin Levy, Ofra Haza and François Atlan, and ensembles such as Sefarad and Azar Trio). He also loaned me English translations of poets such as Samuel ha’Nagid (993-1055/56), Moses ibn Ezra (c.1060-1139) and Judah Halevi (c.1075-1141). Later, on visits to Spain I fell in love with the Jewish quarter in Cordoba and the two surviving medieval synagogues in Toledo – the richly decorated El Transito (close to the house of El Greco, who chose to live in the Jewish quarter of the city) – which contains a fascinating Sephardic museum - and the far ‘chaster’ example provided by a synagogue which became a Christian church, Santa Maria la Blanca. In both buildings one can also see unmistakable evidence of the work of Moorish (i.e. Islamic) craftsmen. Such understanding as I have of the Jewish contribution to Spanish culture is partly based on what I have seen and heard, and partly on two superb books, both of which I treasure: María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002) and The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (2008) by Jerrilynn D. Dodds, María Rosa Menocal and Abigail Krasner Balbale. Though grounded in profound scholarship, The Ornament of the World is written in a delightfully accessible style. It is an inspirational book (indeed, several people who have read it on my recommendation have been ‘inspired’ by it to make a trip to Andalucia!). The Arts of Intimacy is a more obviously scholarly book, but has the advantage of a wealth of beautiful illustrations.
Any understanding of Sephardic culture and its place in the intermittently collaborative relationship between Christians, Muslims and Jews in Medieval Spain is, of course, dependent on the work of great scholars. In recent years one such was the late María Rosa Menocal (1953-2012). In earlier times Alberto Hemsi was another such scholar. His collecting of folk materials from the Sephardic communities scattered around the Mediterranean was vital to the appreciation of the popular poetry and music of the Sephardim. The songs he collected are varied in form and subject. Most are, indeed, coplas, i.e. strophic songs of which each verse was normally sung to the same tune. They were generally sung by groups of singers – most often women – accompanied by the clapping of hands or minimal instrumental accompaniment, such as tambourines. Amongst them are lullabies and dirges, love songs and wedding songs, songs relating to the presentation of dowries or to circumcision, songs of exile and songs for the birth of a child (and at least one drinking song!). There are also some Romances (Romanzas) narrative poems (akin to traditional ballads), usually telling stories from medieval Spain
There are other recordings of Hemsi’s settings, for voice and piano, of these traditional Sephardic songs – such as those by the baritone Assaf Levitin and pianist Naaman Wagner (Rondeau) and tenor Pedro Aledo accompanied by Ludovic Amadeus Selmi (Institut Européen des Musiques Juives), but even without undertaking a detailed comparison, I have no doubt that this is the most valuable set. It is comprehensive, extremely well documented and – perhaps most important – the vocalist is female (and a fine singer). Many of these songs were, the evidence suggests, originally sung by women and many deal with aspects of the lives lived by Jewish women. Born in New York, Tehila Nini Goldstein grew up near Jerusalem in the Judean Mountains. In her teens she sang in the ‘Ankor’ Girls Choir of Jerusalem. In her later professional career she has worked with – amongst others – Les Arts Florissants and William Christie, I Barocchisti and Diego Fasolis, Kurt Masur, Antonio Pappano and Claudio Abbado. She and pianist Jascha Nemtsov have worked together for more than a decade and have recorded and given concert recitals of works by many modern Jewish composers such as Jakob Schönberg, Mieczysław Weinberg and Moshe Milner. Nemtsov, alongside his career as a pianist, researches and teaches the history of Jewish music at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar, where he has a professorial chair; he is also Academic Director of the Cantorial School of the Abraham Geiger College of Potsdam University. In short, Goldstein and Nemtsov are the perfect pair for this project, bringing to it not only their musical skills, but also relevant experience (not least of working together) and scholarship.
While it would be wrong to claim that Alberto Hemsi was a great composer (at least not on the evidence of these settings: I have had no opportunity to hear his other music), it is clear that he was a remarkable man who did important and valuable work. He was born some 35 miles from Smyrna (modern Izmir), in the town of Cassaba (now Turgutlu), which was then within the Ottoman Empire. His family were Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. Those ancestors seem initially to have moved to Italy, and their descendants (including the composer) had Italian citizenship. The future composer/scholar’s musical interests and abilities were recognized early, and when he was ten he was sent to stay with an uncle in Smyrna, so that he could study at a music school run by the Société Musicale Israelite. In 1913 he was awarded a scholarship by the same Société which enabled him to further his studies (primarily in piano and composition) at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. He had ambitions to become a concert pianist. But as an Italian citizen he was obliged to join the Italian army in 1917 and within a few months he was wounded, suffering injuries which put an end to such ambitions. In 1919 he returned to Smyrna and devoted himself to composition and the study of the folklore (especially the songs) of the Sephardic diaspora around the Mediterranean.
In 1924 he moved to live in the then thriving Sephardic community on the island of Rhodes, (a community which was to be destroyed in 1944 when most of its population was deported and slaughtered in the camps by the Germans). However, while in Rhodes, Hemsi met and married his wife, Miryam Capelluto. In 1928 Hemsi was installed as Music Director of the large Eliyahu Synagogue in Alexandria. When the Germans invaded Alexandria in 1941, Hemsi and his family escaped to Cairo. However, after Nasser’s coup in 1952, they were forced to flee again – this time taking up residence (well-nigh penniless) in the Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers. Hemsi found employment teaching Cantors at the Seminaire Israélite de France in Paris, and as music director at two Sephardic synagogues.
Throughout all this upheaval and personal difficulty, Hemsi undertook extensive research into the music and poetry of the Sephardic Jews as it survived in the Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean and the Middle East. He sought out those (often women) who still knew and sang the traditional songs (one might compare what he did, I suppose, with the activities of Bartók or the collectors of English folk songs, though his was a more difficult task, given the geographically wide spread territories he had to visit). He collected some 230 Sephardic songs, publishing his arrangements of 60 of them in ten volumes, published between 1932 and 1973 (see the track list at the close of this review).
There were obvious difficulties in the work he had undertaken. Where the songs the Sephardim ‘took’ with them when forced out of Spain survived, they did so amidst other musico-cultural traditions, such as those of the Arabs, the Greeks or the Turks among whom the exiles now lived, by which the Sephardic songs were likely to be ‘contaminated’. So, for example, ‘Reina de la grazia’ (disc 2, track 22) has a text in Ladino (a Judaeo-Spanish language spoken by the Sephardim), attributed to the Sephardic poet Nassim Yehuda Pardo (fl.1870-80), but the melody, said to have been written by the violinist/composer/singer Hayyim Alazraki (1889-1913) has a distinctively Turkish flavour – it appears to use a Turkish makam – a kind of mode or melodic type. Of another song, ‘Tres hijas tiene el buen rey’ (disc 1, track 9), Hemsi himself writes “one cannot but be perplexed upon discovering, on the one hand, the unquestionably Hispanic origins of the text and, on the other, the music’s patently Turkish origins and aesthetics. For the production of such a hybrid […] one must consider the substitution of an ancient, lost melody, forgotten or deliberately replaced by the anonymous composer of the present musical version.” As Hemsi himself observed, many of these songs were never previously “written down or notated, [being] conceived on the basis of sounds, not notes.” Combining such materials with the conventions of what is essentially ‘Western’ art music presents obvious difficulties. For the most part Hemsi overcomes such problems, though there a few (only a few) moments when he seems ‘trapped’ between his principles as a scholar and his creative instincts as a composer.
Tehila Nini Goldstein has a fine voice, rich (but never too heavy), with a range of attractive colours. She can be tender, as in ‘Durme, durme hermosa donzella (disc 1, track 2), playful, as in ‘Estávase la mora en su bel estar (disc 1, track 12), or lyrically melancholy, e.g. ‘Mi alma triste’ (disc 3, track 11). Everywhere, like the experienced Lieder singer she is, she is attentive both to the melodic line and the precise meaning of the text she is singing. The work of pianist Jascha Nemtsov is exemplary, inflecting Hemsi’s writing for the piano with just the right Spanish ‘flavour’ (at times the sound is reminiscent of de Falla) and the link between vocalist and accompanist seems to operate at the level of intuitive empathy. Appreciation of their work (especially that of Tehila Nini Goldstein) is greatly aided by the documentation Hänssler provide. The text of every one of the 60 songs is followed by a note – some of them as long as half a page – commenting on the social context or on the specifics of text or music. Some of these notes are by Hemsi himself, taken either from the original individual publications of his collection or from the collected edition, edited by Edwin Seroussi and published in Jerusalem in 1995. The remainder are by Jascha Nemtsov.
In other respects too, the documentation accompanying these discs is superb. There’s a booklet essay of 12 pages by Jascha Nemtsov which provides a biographical account of Alberto Hemsi, as well as an account of the huge research project he undertook. There are evocative photographs of Hemsi and his family, of places important in his life and of one (anonymous) female singer from Saloniki who provided Hemsi with information. The texts of all the songs are well translated by Tehila Nini Goldstein, Rivka Havassy and Edwin Seroussi.
In addition to all 60 of the songs published as Coplas Sefardies, the final CD in the set contains Hemsi’s Op.25, Five Hebrew Songs, published in 1948. Of these, ‘Yismekhu’ – part of the Shabat Evening prayers – is particularly moving, while ‘Yonati’, a setting of a verse from the Song of Solomon (2:14) is gloriously sung. The last of the five songs, ‘Shir hashirim’ (Song of Solomon, 1:1-4) is similarly radiant. The closing track of the whole set is Hemsi’s setting of ‘Yom gila yavo, yavo!’ (A day of rejoicing will come) – which is appropriately exultant, a powerful affirmation of faith which makes a fitting conclusion to this remarkable set of discs.
The lengthy and difficult research undertaken by Alberto Hemsi, and the work he put into setting these 60 songs were obviously motivated by his love of his Sephardic inheritance, an attempt to create a new wholeness for something broken and scattered by exile. It is also clear, I think, that for Tehila Nini Goldstein and Jascha Nemtsov recording all of these songs was a labour of love.
Though the relevance of this music might, superficially, seem rather narrow, I’d suggest that in many respects it has a wider interest and significance.
Glyn Pursglove
CD1
Volume 1, Op.27 (1932)
[Spain 1492 – Rhodes 1932]
Yo tomi muchacha [5:54]
Durme, durme hermosa donzella [5:12]
No paséch por la mi sala [5:26]
Dicho me avian dicho [5:21]
Mi sposica está en el baño [3:27]
Ansi dize la nuestra novia [4:26]
Volume 2, Op.8 (1933)
[Spain 1492 – Rhodes 1932]
Como la rosa en la güerta [3:34]
El rey por muncha madruga [2:39]
Tres hijas tiene el buen rey [3:08]
¡Ah, el novio no quere dinero! [1:55]
Vengáx en buen’hora, Siñora coshuegra [3:23]
Estávase la mora en su bel estar [3:33]
Volume 3, Op.13 (1934)
[Spain 1492 – Saloniki 1932]
Una hija tiene el rey [5:12]
Aquel conde y aquel conde [3:30]
Ya salió de la mer la galana [2:33]
Aquel rey de Francia [3:38]
Yo me alevantí un lunes [2:57]
Ya abaxa la novia [2:41]
CD2
Volume 4, Op. 18 (1935)
[Spain 1492 – Saonoliki 1932]
Triste está la infanta [3:25]
Estávase la galana [3:10]
Bendicho Su nombre [5:14]
Quién quiere tomar consejo [3:44]
Tanto fuites y venitas [3:08]
Mercar vos quiero, la mi mujer [2:27]
Volume 5, Op. 22 (1938)
[Spain 1492 – Smyrna 1937}
De las altas mares traen una cautiva [3:37]
Una matica de ruda [2:00]
¿De qué llóras, blanca niña? [3:24]
Avrid, mi galanica [2:31]
Cien donzellas van a la misa [4:50]
Abaxéx abaxo, galanica gentil [1:50]
Volume 6, Op.22 (1969)
[Spain 1492 – Smyrna and Anatolia 1920]
Malaña tripa de madre [3:01]
Bueno asi biva la coshuegra [2:02]
Tres hermanicas eran [2:31]
La Morenica [2:56]
¡Ay! Mancebo [1:40]
El buen viar [2:04]
Volume 7, Op.41 (1970)
[Spain 1492 – Smyrna and Anatolia 1920]
Alevantéx vos toronja [3:01]
Al ruido de una Fuente [2:29]
Cuando la comadre [2:42]
Reina de la gracia [3:28]
Vamos para la unila [2:34]
Dia de alhad [2:50]
CD3
Volume 8, Op.44 (1972)
[Spain 1492 – Smyrna and Anatolia 1920]
Dolores tiene la reina [3:33]
Durmite mi alma [3:16]
Sentado en mi ventana [3:13]
Me parto y me vo’ [2:15]
¿Hombre, en qué te locontienes? [2;46]
Un cabretico [2:21]
Volume 9, Op. 45 (1972)
[Spain 1492 – Istanbul 1933]
De enfrente la vida venir [3:08]
Mi padre era de Francia [3:11]
¿Quen es este paxarico? [2:01]
Torondón [2:07]
Mi alma triste [3:10]
Onete Bonete [2;40]
Volume 10, Op. 51 (1973)
De la juma sale e moro [5:03]
Arboles lloran por luvia [4:49]
La cantiga de la Ley [1:56]
Munchos mueren de su muerte [4:06]
Esta noche es alavada [2:21]
Quen supiense y entendiense [3:38]
Five Hebrew Songs, Op. 25 (1948)
Vedibbarti al aneviim [3:42]
Yismekhu [2:47]
Yonati [3:17]
Im en ani li [3:08]
Shir hashirim [3:07]
Yam gila yavo, yavo!, Op. 17 (1934) [3:49]
