Josef Tal, Tzvi Avni, Gil Shohat: Piano Music from Israel

PIANO MUSIC FROM ISRAEL

The works on this CD were composed in Israel between 1945 and 2001. They span an era that goes back before the founding of the state and extends into the recent past. They were written by composers from different generations. Josef Tal, born in 1910 in Pinne (today: Pniewy) not far from Posen (today: Poznán), the son of a rabbi, grew up and was educated in Berlin, left Nazi Germany in 1934 and immigrated to Eretz Israel with a degree in composition, harp and piano. Tzvi Avni, born Hermann Steinke in Saarbrücken in 1927, left the Saar region in 1935 after it was annexed to Germany and emigrated with his parents via Switzerland to what is now Israel. Since his father was abducted and killed in 1936, he had to contribute to the family's livelihood at an early age, was only able to take his first music lessons at the age of 16 and fought his way through to university entrance qualifications and a career as a composer as an autodidact. Both Tal and Avni were involved in many functions for the development of musical life in Israel, both always looking for international contacts. Gil Shohat is two generations younger. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1973, the son of a journalist who worked for the liberal daily Haaretz, grew up in Israel, studied in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and then expanded his education in composition, piano and conducting in Rome and Manchester.

Josef Tal's Variations
Tal composed Cum mortuis in lingua mortua, at that time still under his original name Josef Grünthal, in 1945 as variations on Modest Mussorgsky's piano piece of the same name. In his piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition, this variant of the »Promenade« follows a piece about the Roman catacombs. Mussorgsky wrote under the heading: »Latin text: with the dead in a dead language. The Latin fits: the creative spirit of Hartmann [the painter of the paintings referred to by Mussorgsky, HT] leads me to skulls, he calls me very close to them, the skulls glow softly«.

For the 35-year-old Tal, this seemed like a weak metaphor for the victims of the Shoah, including his parents and many relatives and acquaintances. The composer knew that there was no direct artistic form of expression for the horror that Nazi-loyal Germans caused through the genocide of the Jews in Europe and for the suffering of the survivors. Pictures, formulas, testimonies from history were able to build the first language bridges. In his variations, Tal examines individual bars, phrases and aspects of Mussorgsky's piece more closely, interprets and interprets them as in an exegesis, leading and transforming them into contrasting gestural characters. They revolve around two poles of expression: lamentation (which can harden into accusation) and ephemerality, which can turn into rage. In their polarity and inner ambivalence, both stand as symbols for deep mourning. This prevails particularly in the sections that appear to be very strict, such as the beginning of the third, passages of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh variation. Heavy mourning in particular needs forms and formulas in order not to sink into despair.

Tal concludes his cycle with a »Fuga con variazioni«, which means: in the fugue, which is derived from Mussorgsky's stylized »Promenade theme«, which has been transformed into a continuation, memories of the previous variations are faded in and worked in, first from Variation VI and finally from Variation I. The work fades away with the memory of her. His circle closes, but in an unusual way: it is not the theme that reappears at the end, as in Bach's Goldberg Variations, but rather the first thoughts and the first commemoration that Mussorgsky's piece initiated in Josef Tal.

Josef Tal's »Essay II«
Between 1986 and 1998 Tal wrote a total of five essays for piano. Your title contains understatement and reference at the same time. At best, they can appear sketchy and loosely assembled when listening superficially. But they are as thoroughly and consistently developed as all of the composer's works. Experience is concentrated in them, while at the same time musical design models are tested.

Essay II was composed by Tal in 1988. He was 78 at the time and had written works in all traditional genres, from solo pieces for one instrument to chamber and vocal music for a wide variety of ensembles, to symphonies and music theatre. The world premiere of his youngest opera at the time, Der Turm, as part of the 37th Berlin Festival was a year ago. As a pioneer in this field, he had set up the first electronic studio in Israel. In addition to purely electronic works, he also composed works for conventional instruments and electronics, including three concertos for piano and electronics. In articles, lectures, seminars and his own works, he thought through the possibilities of new sounds, processes and forms that the electronic medium opened up. The findings also had an effect on compositions for conventional instruments.

In Essay II, Tal explores the behavior and development of opposites at different levels of musical composition. The initial figure in the lower range is notated exactly in terms of its tones (as an eleven-tone row); it is up to the performer how the gesture is executed »quietly, very quickly and clearly«. The low figure is answered by an expressive "cantabile" melody in the high register; except for the last one, it is made up of the same tones. Both poles experience different developments. The fast, deep gesture is expanded through interpolations and shortened through the omission of tones; the procedure is reminiscent of the processing of modules in electronic music. The "cantabile" is expanded from monophony to two-part and multi-part writing.
The two components do not remain separate. Fast, high passages take the quality of the first subject and the register of the second subject and bring them together in suggestion of a perpetuum mobile. It is preceded by a passage of short, halting, complementary short motifs.

The principle of contrast also extends to the overall course. One can interpret Essay II as a reinterpretation of the tripartite form A–B–A'. The middle section is a high perpetuum mobile with interjected melody fragments and chords. The first part, on the other hand, is divided into several mostly antithetical sections. Some of them return in the final part, reference and difference are discussed.

Tzvi Avni's "Epitaph" Sonata
As long as Tzvi Avni taught, he and his students regularly visited exhibitions, especially of modern fine arts. He is convinced that understanding and being open to other arts is also good for his own; the paths of inspiration can lead from one to the other. He himself was often inspired by painting or literature to create musical works; In the latter case, the text of the poem did not always have to appear as a song in the composition. Throughout his life, Jewish mysticism and legends occupied him, similar to Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, not as opposition to the modern world, but as a way of spiritual deepening. They belong to the history and identity of Judaism, but also to Avni's personal history. His parents had moved to Germany from Jarosłav and Przemysl in the early 1920s; they came from the region in which Hasidism once arose and flourished. Evidence of the rich culture that developed there is part of the pool from which Avni's (music) thinking draws.

The Epitaph Sonata, composed between 1974 and 1979, ie over a relatively long period of time, provides an important example of this. Avni wrote: »The composer sees his Epitaph Sonata as a musical testimony that contains much of his personal creed. In the course of a single movement, the work unfolds a great variety of textures, moods, timbres and styles. The term ›sonata‹ refers to the dimension as well as to the lyrical and dramatic content of the music and not to its formal structure. A passage about the source and heart of the world from one of the tales by Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlaw - The Tale of the Seven Beggars - serves as the work's motto. However, the story is not used as a basis for 'program music', it is merely the spiritual starting point, an idea more hidden than shown as it would be.«

Historical forerunners for Avni's artistic approach can be found in Franz Liszt's Dante Sonata or in the organ sonata of his student Julius Reubke, who died young, on the 94th Psalm. But tonal language, intensity and form cannot be compared. Avni had a number of reasons for composing an »Epitaph«, but one reason above all: in 1973, a year before he began work on his sonata, his wife, the singer Pnina Avni, died young of cancer. Ten years earlier he had written a pioneering work for her, a vocalise for soprano and electronics. He also gave this composition the free “form of the sonata by contrasting not themes but the human voice and the electronic sound as formal elements”. [Yehuda Walter Cohen, Becoming and Development of Music in Israel, in: Max Brod, The Music of Israel. Revised edition with a second part Becoming and developing music in Israel, Kassel 1976, p. 90] The vocal, expressive passages that constitute the form of the epitaph are memories of Pnina. They begin in unison, then expand to two or more voices, just as the mournful thinking back gradually expands into history, to where a large part of the Jewish people once sought happiness and, after many generations, met their death. The passages are titled “Cantabile”, “nostalgico”.

The repeated tones at the beginning, with their irregular spacing, indicate being in time, and thus also impermanence; On the one hand, they predetermine the partly bell-like, partly heavy chords that run through the entire sonata in a structured manner, and on the other hand the declamation is indicated, in which the music comes close to an imaginary language, as in a forecourt of lamentation of the song. In the middle of the work there is a melody underlaid with short chords. Around them, the form of Avni's sonata forms in concentric correspondences. At the end it fades away – with the repeated tones of the beating heart and the longing cries from and into the distance. Actually, the work does not end, it disappears from our listening area. The composer wrote »Infinity is endless« in the place where »Fine« usually stands.

Tzvi Avni: »From my diary«
The piano cycle From my diary, which Avni wrote for a pianist master class in 2001, also builds on memories. The first piece evokes the pioneering days of new Israel music with its tendency towards impressionism and the integration of folk models from different traditions, for example the popular Hora dance, the contours of which shine through again and again in Avni's piece. Pieces two and three evoke the inspirational power of modern images; the second, Heroische Bogenstriche after Paul Klee, paints a picture of violinist virtuosity, a magnificent »As if«; the line or verse-like structure corresponds to the structure of Klee's picture from 1938. »The night song of a flying octopus refers«, says Avni, »to my impressions of Miró's works, which often seem to the viewer as if one is seeing a world of strange, fascinating creatures floating through the air". The hard, final floating fourth track is inspired by the biblical figure of Cain, whose sacrifice God rejected while he accepted Abel's sacrifice. Out of the feeling of humiliation, neglect and envy he became a murderer. Like many biblical figures, Cain represents certain aspects of humanity. The last piece, Amen, is dedicated to Martin Buber. »Buber would perhaps shout the loudest 'Amen' in the 20th century, and the study of his writings is arguably the brightest ray of light on the dark ways of human suffering. Even in the fundamental questions he often throws at us, he always seeks the positive and the acceptance of the world as it is - an acceptance that I translate into the D major chord that closes this piece and thus the whole cycle .« (Tzvi Avni)

Gil Shohat's Piano Pieces
Gil Shohat was born 25 years after the founding of the State of Israel, grew up in the tense community that had set itself the task of integrating different traditions as a cultural task and that successfully defended itself against external threats in the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars had. There will be few other countries with so much effervescent artistic intelligence that Shohat has benefited from since he received his first systematic music lessons at the age of seven. He began to compose at an early age, and at the age of twelve he played his first piano works in public concerts. The works on this CD are also documents of a musical language that was acquired early on. Shohat wrote the Three Improvisations on Paintings when he was sixteen, he chose paintings that emerged on the threshold of modernity: Munch, Klimt and van Gogh. His piano pieces – Shohat is a brilliant pianist himself – continue the composing from the mutual inspiration of the arts that, a good generation older, Tzvi Avni represents. They show artistic sovereignty.

Shohat does not attempt to tracing the images in sound, but rather captures their tone and ambience. He does not compose the scream from Edvard Munch's famous painting; he articulates the somber background from which he erupts and indicates the glaring height at which the pain works. He creates the piece about Gustav Klimt's allegory tragedy – a nod to the modern age after 1900 – from the melos of a twelve-tone row. She receives counterforces: circular movements, in which her core motif is also involved, rapid figures, flying up or rotating on the spot underground; they create soundscapes into which various forms of the series are drawn. The piece is designed as an increase that breaks off at the end because it has no goal. Van Gogh's café terrace in the evening triggered a waltz fantasy at Shohat in the style of the slightly Americanized and stylishly erotic light music of French bohème.

A year after the Three Improvisations, the piano piece The Kiss of Salome was written. At the end of Oscar Wilde's drama, Salome, "Daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judea," becomes erotic when she holds and kisses the head of the decapitated Johanaan (John the Baptist). Gil Shohat's piece, a work of astronomical virtuosity, refers to this passage. The composer writes that his kiss of Salome is »an improvisation, a musical impression, a passing vision. This is the infinite sensuality of Salome, the love that erupts from her, darkening life, burning, destructive, Salome's kiss, the height of love and the pinnacle of depravity". In Wilde, the princess's monologue ends: 'The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. One should only see love«.

Habakkuk Trotter