Music of Paul Ben-Haim on BIS Records

from the Amazon.com Web page for this album

At the beginning of this month, BIS Records released Evocation, an album of solo, chamber, and concertante works for violin by Paul Ben-Haim. The violinist is Israeli violinist Itamar Zorman. He is accompanied by both the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Philippe Bach, and pianist Amy Yang. Ben-Haim’s name had at least a moderate level of familiarity about half a century ago, but he has pretty much faded into obscurity following his death on January 14, 1984. Zorman is clearly interested in bringing him back into the spotlight.

Ben-Haim is somewhat of an anomaly in the history of twentieth-century music. There are those who would say that he served a role in Israel similar to that of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály in Hungary; but, unlike both of these composers, Ben-Haim’s roots were far from the Middle East. He was born Paul Frankenburger in Munich, and he was one of many musicians that left Europe when anti-Semitism was on the rise. He emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1933. By way of context, the Palestine Orchestra was founded by violinist Bronisław Huberman in 1936, consisting primarily of Jewish musicians that had been dismissed from European orchestras. (The ensemble would change its name to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra after the creation of the State of Israel.)

However, while there was a community of Jewish musicians in Palestine, most Jewish immigrants had other priorities involving matters such as providing food, clothing, and shelter. In addition, relations with British authorities were never particularly smooth. Indeed, that was a time when the bond between Jews and Arabs was much stronger by virtue of the shared goal of getting rid of the Brits. Of course that bond was shattered when the United Nations recognized the formation of Israel as a Jewish state.

Through the course of that tumultuous history Ben-Haim (having changed his name after leaving Europe) tried to stick to his knitting, which amounted to the cultivation of what his Wikipedia page calls a “Jewish national music.” Ironically, when we think about composers that tried to capture the spirit of Judaism, the name likely to come up most frequently is that of Ernest Bloch, whose departure from Europe (much earlier) took him west, rather than east. (To the best of my knowledge, Bloch never visited Israel; and I am pretty sure that, during the two years I spent in Haifa when I was teaching computer science at the Technion, I never heard any of Bloch’s music, either in concert or on the radio.)

The Ben-Haim compositions on Evocation cover works created between 1942 and 1981. Efforts to evoke any sort of Middle Eastern spirit never seem to venture beyond the surface structure of the idiomatic. While his command of the underlying grammar of each of his compositions is never anything less than competent, what the music is actually trying to express has a tendency to devolve into trivial clichés. In many respects the high point of the album can be found in the three studies he composed for Yehudi Menuhin, which go back to the basics of musical competence without trying to seek out an “indigenous” rhetoric. Zorman’s technique in performing those studies is impressive, as it is over the course of the entire album. However, the “overall journey” through that album does not leave the attentive listener with many memorable moments.