Complete Piano Songs of Hemsi on Rondeau

courtesy of Naxos of America

Born in 1898 in Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire), composer Alberto Hemsi had roots that could be traced back to the Sephardic Jews that lived in the Iberian peninsula prior to their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496. His inquiries into his family origins led to an ethnomusicological study of Sephardic melodies that paralleled the research in Eastern Europe conducted by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. The songs that Hemsi collected consisted only of words set to melodies. Much of his career as a composer involved writing piano accompaniments for these songs, which were collected in a series of ten volumes, each given the title Coplas Sefardies (Sephardic songs) and each collected from a different geographical region.

Both Bartók and Kodály would repurpose the tunes they had collected for their own stylistic purposes. However, probably because of the Iberian origins, the closest “family resemblance” to Hemsi’s accompaniments can probably be found in the vocal compositions of Manuel de Falla, the best known being his settings of seven Spanish folksongs, which he composed in 1914. Indeed, the use of augmented seconds in the last of the Falla songs, “Polo,” has definite “Eastern” sonorities; and I am sure that I am not the only one who hears the opening “¡Ay!” expletive as an unmistakably Yiddish “Oy!.” Nevertheless, like Falla, Hemsi seemed more interested in capturing the spirit of the text through contemporary rhetoric, rather than providing material for “historically informed” performances.

At the beginning of this month, Rondeau completed its project to release recordings of all of the Coplas Sefardies publications. The vocalist is Cantor Assaf Levitin (bass-baritone), accompanied at the piano by Naaman Wagner. Once again Amazon.com has not been on the ball; so the best source for the third and final volume in this collection is the Web page created by Presto Classical, which supports both physical and download purchases. For those interested in the complete set, Presto also has Web pages for Volume 1 and Volume 2.

All of the Coplas Sefardies texts are in Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino). The second and third volumes also include settings of texts in Hebrew. The track listing for Volume 2 concludes with Hemsi’s Opus 48 Visions Bibliques (Biblical visions); but, in spite of the French title, the texts themselves are in Hebrew.

Whether or not one accepts twentieth-century rhetoric to accompany songs that date back at least as far as the Middle Ages is a matter of taste. My own taste tends to approve of the choices Hemsi made for setting the Sephardic texts. He does not seem to be forcing a synthesis of Iberian and Jewish influences; and, as a result, any individual collection from the Coplas Sefardies series makes for satisfying listening. However, as is the case with the Lyric Pieces collections of Edvard Grieg, listening to one collection at a time is quite enough.

Where Hebrew sources are concerned, the results are more variable. I have to say that I preferred Hemsi’s Opus 12 “Kal Nidrey” setting to the incantation I had to endure back when I was a teenager preparing for a bar mitzvah. On the other hand, the Opus 25 includes a Talmudic text that, even with my current atheist convictions, I still take very seriously. The source is the fourteenth verse in the first chapter of Pirkei Avot (ethics of the fathers), which quotes Hillel the Elder as follows:

If I am not for myself who is for me? And being for my own self, what am “I?” And if not now, when?

For me these words have transcended both religious and cultural origins, which is why I could appreciate Spike Lee incorporating them (without attribution) at the conclusion of BlacKkKlansman. Sadly (at least to me), Hemsi set these words to a jaunty little tune that could just as easily have been a child’s nursery rhyme. This struck me as an unpleasant jolt, and I was thankful its performance took less than two and a half minutes! However, in the overall context of the entire collection, this one setting is a mere pilpul!