Lazar Weiner was
a pre-eminent Yiddish art composer. Born in Cherkassy in the
Ukraine he studied choral singing as a boy at the Brodsky
Synagogue in Kiev. At eleven he was also singing in the Kiev
opera chorus but anti-Semitic unrest led to his emigration
to America in 1914. Once there he quickly became an accompanist
and moved in the circle of Yiddish poets, not least in the
numerous salons that flourished at the time. It was in fact
in New York, and not in the Ukraine, that Weiner immersed
himself in Yiddish culture. Along the way he studied with
some important composers and teachers – Robert Russell Bennett
and Frederick Jacobi - and began work for choruses, societies
and synagogues. The Workmen’s Circle Chorus, founded just
before the First World War, was his major focus for thirty-five
years – he wrote his choral music for it and conducted the
chorus.
His Yiddish songs
number over two hundred and the Naxos Milken Archive gives
us a good selection of thirty-two. It offers a fair perspective
from which to glean something of his musical imperatives in
songs that span his compositional life, from 1918 to 1977.
The Yiddish literary
revival in New York meant that he could choose from among
the many of his gifted contemporaries. And he chose to set
a number of poets whose names will mean little to those outside
the milieu but whose names certainly resonated powerfully
at the time. Weiner may have come to regard some of the more
stylised early settings as a touch archaic and backward looking
but they do have vigour and animation. He began then with
folkloric material but moved onto more cosmopolitan settings.
The surprising thing for a listener is that the influence
is decidedly French, in those settings that strike sparks.
There’s little obvious Russian influence here – no Rubinstein
or Grechaninov or Rachmaninov that one can detect – though
there are some Mussorgskian moments in such as Viglid,
a cradle song (track 13).
The songs offer
some tart Klezmer opportunities and evocative folkloric ones.
But track four - Ikh hob far dir a sod – which dates
from as late as 1945 offers Debussian piano writing of unmistakeable
lineage. Impressionism is in fact a strong element throughout.
There are dissonances in the piano writing – the setting of
Got un Mentsh [God and Man] offers up its fair share;
and there is also some fiercely declamatory writing as well.
On the debit side some of the strophic writing wears badly
and some of the songs veer toward the melodically nondescript.
The performers
- and there are a lot of them - are a very varied bunch. Some
are excellent and others far less acceptable. Some struggle
technically and some have a resinous and metallic vocal production
that will put off unsympathetic auditors. Nasal and adenoidal
singers have their own cachet, doubtless, but the more ingratiating
singers bring the best results.
As usual there are
voluminous notes offering a huge amount of detail. The recordings
vary; a few were obviously recorded on amateur set-ups back in
1972 and these have a fair degree of tape hiss. But the vast majority
sound splendid.
Jonathan Woolf
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