courtesy of PIAS
The title of the latest album to be released by the Jerusalem Quartet on harmonia mundi is The Yiddish Cabaret. That title refers to a project that the group, whose members are violinists Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam, and Kyril Zlotnikov, initiated with Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov, funded by a commission from harmonia mundi. The result is a set of five songs setting Yiddish texts sung by soprano Hila Baggio, accompanied only by the string quartet. This music is introduced on the album by Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 26 (second) string quartet and Erwin Schulhoff’s set of five pieces, each based on a different style, scored for string quartet. The album will be released this Friday; and, as usual, Amazon.com has set up a Web page to process pre-orders.
According to the booklet notes provided by Kam, the Jerusalem Quartet was approached by harmonia mundi to think of a concept for a “different” album. The response was to prepare an album of “Jewish music.” (Those are not necessarily “scare quotes;” so I should make clear that I am quoting Kam’s text.) In unpacking that quoted phrase, I feel need to establish some terminological foundations that distinguish three key adjectives, “Israeli,” “Jewish,” and “Yiddish.”
The members of the Jerusalem Quartet are all Israeli. Whether or not they are practicing Jews should not be an issue; but it may be relevant to what they, as a group, take to be “Jewish music.” Schulhoff had Jewish ancestry. He is more accurately described as a Czech composer and none of the pieces in the set of five included on this album would be taken by anyone to be “Jewish.” Of course, as far as the Nazis were concerned, he was Jewish enough to be deported to the Wülzburg concentration camp on German soil in Bavaria. (He entered that camp in June of 1941 and died there of tuberculosis in August of the following year.) On a broader scale, however, none of the composers of music played on previous Jerusalem Quartet albums are Jewish; and, while some of them had interests in Jewish sources, none of those interests arise in the compositions that the Jerusalem Quartet recorded.
Where the adjective “Yiddish” is concerned, it is applied primarily to language that was used by most Jews in Eastern Europe. It reflects a culture that is decidedly different from that of the Israelis or even, for that matter, Jews of Russian descent that moved to Israel. (Three of the members of the Jerusalem Quartet seem to fall into that latter category. Kam is the only member whose name is closer to Israeli than to Russian.) The operative word, however, is “culture.” That culture, known as Yiddishkeit, is shared by many Jews around the world and across the United States. It is so extensive that Yiddishkeit is a part of Jewish life even for those that do not speak Yiddish. Nevertheless, the Internet has enabled an entropy that is more likely to homogenize cultures than to distinguish them. As a result, there is a serious risk that Yiddishkeit will die out, perhaps in a matter of years; but those who embrace it tend to do so passionately.
How does this linguistic exercise apply to the forthcoming release of The Yiddish Cabaret? Let me approach that question elliptically with an old joke that the Great Wall of China is not particularly great, is not even a wall, and is not in China: It is in New York, and it is called the Triborough Bridge! I would postulate that The Yiddish Cabaret is an album presenting songs that are, at best, cabaret music and show few, if any signs, of Yiddishkeit. I would warrant that claim by observing that, here in San Francisco, I have been able to enjoy highly perceptive and thoroughly enjoyable performances of Yiddish songs by Sharon Bernstein, Cantor of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. Bernstein knows more about Yiddish culture than Desyatnikov (who, to the best of my knowledge, is not Jewish) could ever hope to grasp; and her command of Yiddish inflections blows Baggio’s delivery of Desyatnikov’s songs way off the map.
That said, I am always happy to encounter a string quartet willing to take the trouble to record the music of Korngold and Schulhoff.
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