This
CD, one of the extensive series of Naxos issues from the Milken
Archive of American Jewish Music, is something of a mixed bag,
in both style and quality. In one sense, it merely reflects
the composer’s extraordinarily varied career. Born in Bochum
– as Goetz Gustav Ksinski – the composer spent his boyhood in
Berlin; he joined the Zionist youth movement as persecution
increased, after Kristallnacht in 1938 he emigrated to Palestine.
In 1946 he moved to the USA. He worked as organist in a Reform
synagogue in Los Angeles – and as a pianist in Supper Clubs;
he began to conduct for theatrical productions; later his skills
led to his working with artists such as Josephine Baker and
Lotte Lenya. He became a staff arranger for Vanguard Records.
He also encountered composers such as Castelnuovo-Tedesco and
Heinrich Schalit.
In
the mid 1960s he encountered the new synthesizer developed by
Robert Moog and embraced its use enthusiastically. He wrote
popular hits like ‘popcorn’, produced albums (still selling)
such as Music to Moog by and The In Sound from Way
Out. He was apparently the first person to use the Moog
synthesizer in live performances. At the same time he was also
responding to the changing attitudes prevailing in some American
synagogues, in search of new musical idioms for use in liturgical
contexts. The confluence of these interests and influences lies
behind three of the works on this CD - Jazz Psalms,
Shabbat for Today and Shiru Ladonai. They
attracted a good deal of attention at the time, stirring up
a certain amount of controversy, with their use of thoroughly
popular idioms and, in two cases, of the synthesizer. The Jazz
Psalms were written to a commission by cantor David Benedikt,
for use at Temple Israel in Lawrence, New York. There is plenty
of fluent writing and – as ever with Kingsley – this is music
of utter competence. But listened to some forty years after
its composition, it now sounds rather bland and slight. In the
other two pieces the synthesizer is used; I have, I confess,
never been very keen on the sound of the synthesizer (especially
early models) and its use here does little to reconcile me to
the very predictable harmonies and less than fascinating rhythms.
With
Voices from the Shadow we move into altogether different
territory. An altogether less modish work, this is an extensive
setting of texts by thirteen poets, texts either written in
the concentration camps or by inmates of those camps after their
liberation. At the premiere of Voices from the Shadow
at the Merkin Concert Hall in New York, on 9 November 1997,
the performance included a spoken commentary (not included on
the recording) and theatrical lighting. The booklet notes by
Neil W. Levin report that at the end of that first performance
“the entire audience rose to its feet in a unanimous ovation”
and explain that “this standing audience included a number of
holocaust refugees, survivors, and former camp inmates”. I am
not surprised that the work should have been so well received.
It sets texts in Yiddish, French, German, Polish, Czech and
English translation. The poems have been very intelligently
chosen and arranged to make a thoroughly coherent sequence.
Some of the poems are quite sophisticated works of art, others
are terrifyingly moving in their simple dignity. Kingsley’s
music is everywhere sensitive, never pushing itself forward
at the expense of the texts, but supplementing them with insight.
Music’s absence of a first person pronoun universalises, unostentatiously,
the autobiographical content of some of the poems, links them
one to another. The settings are relatively various in tempo
and in the use they make of the small chamber ensemble and the
colours it makes possible. There are even moments of grim irony;
the whole is a moving affirmation of enduring human values,
of love and hope, in the face of horrors which can never be
adequately imagined. Theodor Adorno’s famous statement to the
effect that making the concentration camps the subject of a
work of art is itself an act of barbarism, contains a horrible
truth; but for art to avoid such horrors is also a concession
to barbarism. Out of such tensions comes Voices from Shadow,
moving and resonant in its avoidance of rhetoric and sentimentality.
Voices
from the Shadow deserves to find many listeners. But once
they have heard it – I suspect that many will, like me, find
the rest of the CD a serious anti-climax.
Glyn Pursglove
1 Amy
Goldstein (soprano), Mary Catherine George (soprano), Matthew Walley (tenor),
Larry Picard (baritone), Derek Bernel (clarinet), Jorge Avila (violin),
Robin Zeh (violin), Liuh-Wen Ting (viola), Sara Hewitt-Roth (cello), Milton
Granger (piano) conducted by Gershon Kingsley; 2 Lisa Vroman
(soprano), Harvey Estrin (flute), Patrick Rebillot (piano), John Beal
(bass), Gordon Gottlieb (percussion), Daniel Gottlieb (percussion), The
Kingsley Singers/Gershon Kingsley; 3 Cantor Howard M. Stahl,
Harry Goz (narrator), The Kingsley Singers, Gershon Kingsley (synthesizers)/Gershon
Kingsley; 4 Cantor Howard M. Stahl, Lisa Vroman (soprano),
The Kingsley Singers, Gershon Kingsley (synthesizers)/Gershon Kingsley
