The
works on this disc come from The Milken Archive of American
Jewish Music, a repository of Jewish music written in the
USA, that its founder, Lowell Milken felt was in danger
of being lost to the world. His organisation has done
sterling work in ensuring that these works are preserved
for future generations. Naxos has enabled the public at
large to have the opportunity of hearing them, and being
a budget label, has made it possible for more people to
do so than would have been the case had such works appeared
on some obscure label with less exposure on the music scene.
Gershon
Kingsley (born Goetz Gustav Ksinski in Germany in 1922)
sees his own creative world as one in which “Mozart dances
with the Beatles and Carl Jung struggles to reconcile the
opposites of our human soul”. However, if the works on
this disc are typical of his output he should in no way
be seen as any kind of a ‘crossover composer’ for although
there are suggestions of ‘popular culture’ that emerge
from the works they are indisputably serious in nature,
content and origin.
He
described the first composition on this disc, Voices
from the Shadow, in the following terms: “One CANNOT
write about Auschwitz. One MUST write -write and write
- about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. It seems that when
we are forced to walk that corridor between Life and Death,
sources of creativity become readily available, and Life
is compelled to express itself.” That is certainly the
case with this music – settings of 18 poems by concentration
camp inmates, many of whom perished in them. The overriding
feeling one is left with after hearing this work is of
the unquenchable spirit of the human soul that will reach
out and express itself whatever the conditions and however
hard forces of evil may try to extinguish it.
Both
the music and often the words reminded me of Shostakovich’s “From
Jewish Folk Poetry” and it has the same vitality, albeit
tinged as it is with sorrow and suffering. The harmonies
are unmistakably Jewish and perfectly frame the words.
The spare writing, set for just six instruments, highlights
the poignant nature of the words. Number 11 in the set, “Shlof mayn
kind” (Sleep, my child), for example includes the words: “Your
mother would sing of golden stars and of the nightingale’s
melody. Now your mother grieves like a bird at an empty
nest; Of your brothers – shadows of mounds of earth remain …” This
is wonderful music inspired by the most horrendous experiences
and is another powerfully expressed example of how Man
will triumph over whatever horrors are thrown at him.
Jazz
Psalms are two extracts Kingsley took from a commission to write three liturgical
settings using the jazz idiom, originally entitled Three
Hebrew Prayers in a Jazz Idiom. They are extremely
effective fusions of “American jazz idioms and traditional
Hebrew character” and, as the writer Rabbi Joel Y. Zion
put it, “… result in a new 20th century American
Jewish musical expression.” The recording was made with
live jazz musicians and used no synthesized sounds. Kingsley
has captured the jazz idiom in a way that few composers
of classical music have managed to do when they have
explored the idiom in their compositions.
Shabbat
for Today was an attempt
to create a work for use in reform synagogues that would
find more relevance with the younger generation than
traditional liturgical works and established synagogue
ritual. As can be imagined this ran into a great deal
of opposition from the older clergy and the more conservative
places of worship. It taps into what was then the new
generation of “rock operas” with its synthesized sounds
and does it very well. I trust it found favour with its
intended audience as it certainly made me want to hear
the complete work.
I
was also left wanting to hear the whole of the final work
on the disc, Shiru Ladonai, a welcome to the Sabbath,
which was commissioned in 1970 and was originally scored
for organ and moog synthesizer, but cantor David Putterman
who had commissioned the work said after its premiere in
which he had sung the solo part that it was a wonderful
work but asked if “… we could do it without the Moog?”. In
this version it is scored mainly for orchestra, sadly un-credited,
but with synthesizers too. Once again the work shows Kingsley
to be an extremely inventive composer whose other works
I would most interested to explore.
The
disc is accompanied by an extremely informative 27 page
booklet with complete words to all the works and biographies
of the poets of the first piece on the disc.
An
invaluable addition to the burgeoning American Jewish Music
archive and a thoroughly absorbing and enjoyable disc.
Steve Arloff
see also reviews by Adam
Binks and Glyn Pursglove
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Amy Goldstein
(soprano); Mary Catherine George (soprano); Matthew Walley
(tenor); Larry Picard (baritone); Derek
Bermel (clarinet); Jorge Avila (violin); Robin Zeh (violin);
Liuh-Wen Ting (viola); Sara Hewitt-Roth (cello); Milton
Granger (piano); Gershon Kingsley (conductor) 
