The Cleveland Jewish News/part TWO

[Dan Kazez <kazez...>]

            Music on Jewish Themes:  A European Concert Tour
                             Daniel Kazez
                         Cleveland Jewish News

                               part two




Monday, June 26:  We drove west, gradually replacing the vertical 
splendor of the Alps with the horizontal beauty of eastern France.  I 
celebrated my arrival in France with an exquisite French dinner (with, 
by chance, cello music in the background)--3 courses, each drenched with 
a different sauce.  With my few words of French, the menu was quite 
incomprehensible.  My neighbors (visitors from Denmark) assisted, 
translating French to Danish and then to English.

Tuesday, June 27:  Driving west again, we arrived in Paris in the late 
afternoon, in time to fight the city traffic and leisurely visit 
Montmartre and the Sacre-Coeur.

Wednesday, June 28:  A too-brief day wandering the sights of Paris 
(Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, the Arc de Triomphe, and the 
Eiffel Tower) was followed by an exhilarating performance at Temple 
Victoire, the largest synagogue in Europe.  The building is in 
Romanesque revival style, embellished with Byzantine decorations.  Its 
construction was financed by the Rothschild family.  The crowd was 
virtually ecstatic.  At the end of our performance, we received a 
standing ovation, rhythmic clapping, and calls for encores.

Thursday, June 29:  A brief trip to Brussels and a cursory visit to the 
city's sights (the Grand' Place and nearby areas) preceded our evening 
performance.  The concert, sponsored by Merkaz 'Hai, was held at the 
Cercle Ben Gourion--a community center named after Israel's first prime 
minister, a die-hard activist in establishing the Jewish homeland.  At 
500 Belgian Francs (twenty dollars) a ticket, this event served to 
benefit the needy children of Brussels.

Friday, June 30:  Our final concert was scheduled for London.  We 
covered the relatively short trip from Brussels by a laborious 
succession of train-ferry-train-subway, and arrived at our home for two 
and a half days in London--a lovely guest house on London's north side.

Saturday, July 1:  I spent a leisurely day roaming the museums, squares, 
and royal sights of London.  In late afternoon, I took a long subway 
ride to Putney, the neighborhood of London where I had lived for a year 
three decades earlier.  (My father, a physicist at Penn State, spent a 
sabbatical in London, conducting research at Imperial College.)  My 
temporary home and grade school, as well as the winding and charming 
streets of Putney, brought back scattered memories.

Sunday, July 2:  Another day of sight-seeing in a cool and wet London 
ended with the final concert of our European concert tour.  The site was 
the Manor House Society (the largest Jewish Community Center in Europe), 
in a concert jointly sponsored by the London Museum of Jewish Life and 
the Sternberg Centre for Judaism.  Mid-way through the performance, I 
paused to acknowledge a special guest in the audience:  Pamela Hope-
Levin.  Two years earlier, Hope-Levin had visited Wittenberg to 
participate in a Holocaust conference.  She was set to give a dramatic 
presentation with violin accompaniment, only to find that her violinist 
was ill and had not arrived on campus.  With twenty-four hours' notice, 
I was called on to fill in (on cello, of course).  The next day's 
performance, which was quite a success, spurred me to consider 
performing art music inspired by my own Jewish tradition.  (My father, 
now an eminent physicist, is a Sephardic Jew who emigrated to the U.S. 
from Turkey after World War II in search of further education.  My 
mother, an accomplished artist and internationally recognized 
triathlete, is of Ashkenazic descent.)  After several years scouring the 
nation's libraries and databases for scores, I unearthed a body of 
wonderful, but rarely performed, compositions.

Our London performance was wonderfully received.  On stage, at the 
conclusion of our concert (and our European tour), we were each given a 
bottle of fine Rothschild wine!  (The Rothschilds are a long family line 
of world-famous bankers, financiers, and philanthropists.  Our 
performance site in Paris, Temple Victoire, is also known as the 
Rothschild Synagogue.)

Monday, July 3:  By subway, train, ferry, train, tram, train, and 
subway, I traveled from London to Brussels (to store my cello, music, 
and tuxedo), and then to the Amsterdam airport.  My next destination:  
Istanbul, where I would be joined by my family and would have the 
opportunity to visit relatives that I had not seen since 1972.  The 
purpose of my trip, however, was academic:  an examination of music 
performance tradition in Turkey (primarily Istanbul) and Greece 
(Rebetica music).  And that, of course, is yet another story--longer and 
more exotic; but it will have to wait for another day, another page.

   *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *


                    Concert Program

Six Israeli Melodies--Joachim Stutschewsky (1891-1982)

        1. Kinnereth; 2. Raindrops; 3. You, The Earth;
   4. Oriental Melody; 5. Prayer; 6. Wanderer's Song 

Joachim Stutschewsky (1891-1982) was a composer, folklorist, cellist, 
lecturer, writer, and proponent of Jewish music. Born in Ukraine, to a 
family that had been klezmorim (Jewish folk musicians) for several 
generations, Stutschewsky took up the violin at the age of five, and 
switched to the cello at eleven. Later, he moved to Zurich (1914) and 
Vienna (1924), where he founded the Association for the Development of 
Jewish Music.  He moved to Israel in 1938. Stutschewsky collected and 
edited Hassidic melodies, and incorporated many of these in his 
compositions.


Israeli Dance--Julius Chajes (1910-1985)

A resident of Vienna, Tel-Aviv, and then Detroit, Julius Chajes (1910-
1985) was the son of a surgeon and a concert pianist. In Palestine 
(1934-36) he conducted research on ancient Hebrew music. Chajes arrived 
in the U.S. in 1937, and served as Music Director at the Jewish 
Community Center in Detroit. He was chairman of Hashofar, a society for 
the promotion of Jewish music.


Prayer (From Jewish Life)--Ernest Bloch (1880-1959)

At the age of ten, Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) wrote a vow that he would 
become a composer. Then, in ritual fashion, he burned the paper over a 
mound of stones positioned in the shape of an altar. Born in Geneva, 
Switzerland, he worked for a time in the family clock-making business. 
Bloch's earliest works incorporated traditional Jewish tunes as sung by 
his father, who was the son of Meyer Bloch, president of the Jewish 
community of Lengnau (in the Swiss Canton of Aargau). After composing 
many of his major Jewish-inspired works, including Schelomo (1916), he 
moved permanently to the United States, founded the Cleveland Institute 
of Music (1920), and later became director of the San Francisco 
Conservatory (1925). Bloch is one of the best known composers whose 
musical style and subject matter lean toward Judaism.


A Yigdal from Yemen--Harvey Gaul (1881-1945)

American composer and conductor Harvey Gaul (1881-1945) performed as 
organist in his native New York, as well as in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. 
His teachers included the French composer Vincent d'Indy. He was the 
first music director of radio station KDKA and a music critic for the 
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Most of his 500+ compositions were published 
under pseudonyms.


Wie einst in schoner'n Tagen--David Popper (1843-1913)

Best known as a master cellist and pedagogue, David Popper (1843-1913) 
was also a prolific composer of very effective genre pieces for the 
cello. He was born in Prague and died near Vienna. His technical works 
form the basis of modern cello study. Popper died in Baden, before the 
beginning of World War I. According to Popper's student and biographer 
Stephen De'ak, Popper's wife "was not able to escape the Nazi occupation 
of Austria, and like millions of others of her faith she was captured by 
the Gestapo, and sent to a concentration camp in Germany, where she met 
her end in the gas chambers."

Four Folk Songs:

"Rozhinkes Mit Mandlen" ("Raisins and Almonds")--A. Goldfaden
"Y'rushalayim Shel Zahav" ("Jerusalem of Gold")--N. Shemer
"Ani Ma-amin"--ghetto song
"Erev Shel Shoshanim"--J. Hadar


Prayer and Dance--Srul Irving Glick (born 1934)

The father of Canadian composer Srul Irving Glick (born in Toronto, 
1934) emigrated to Canada from Russia, where he became cantor in several 
of Toronto's synagogues. The young Glick was deeply influenced by his 
participation in choirs and by hearing his father sing. He studied at 
the University of Toronto, receiving degrees in music theory and 
composition. Glick's teachers include Darius Milhaud and John Weinzweig. 
One of Canada's most celebrated composers, he is also active as a 
conductor, teacher, and radio producer. Glick is composer-in-residence 
at Beth Tikvah Synagogue in Toronto.


Chant hebraique--Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968)

A member of an old Florentine family, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-
1968) studied music at the Cherubini Royal Institute of Music. His 
discovery (in 1925) of a notebook of Jewish melodies, in his 
grandfather's house, led him to begin composing Jewish compositions: 
"The discovery of this little notebook was one of the deepest emotions 
of my life and became for me a precious heritage." Soon thereafter, he 
became familiar with the sounds of synagogue cantillation and Hebrew 
melodies. Racial laws forced Castelnuovo-Tedesco to leave his native 
Italy. When anti-Semitism became rampant in Italy, during its alliance 
with Nazi Germany, Castelnuovo-Tedesco fled to the U.S. (1939). He 
settled in Hollywood where, like many other composers of his time, he 
composed film music, along with his other works.

Frejlachs--Joachim Stutschewsky

   *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

Daniel Kazez began playing the cello at the age of five, under the 
tutelage of Leonard Feldman, cellist of the Alard String Quartet.  Kazez 
has earned music degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory, the Peabody 
Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, and a doctorate from the 
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), where he was awarded three 
consecutive Rackham Fellowships.  With pianist Eric Street, he has 
performed recitals in many of the musical capitals of Europe, including 
Berlin, Salzburg, Brussels, and London.  His Paris and Florence debuts 
(in 1995) earned him standing ovations; and he recently performed to a 
standing-room-only audience in Rome.  His first performance in eastern 
Europe was at the 1995 Prague International Festival of Jewish Culture.  
Kazez has also appeared in most of the major metropolitan areas of the 
United States, including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, 
Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.  He 
performed as founding member of the Castalia String Quartet, and is now 
a member of the Corinthian Chamber Players.

        He is the author of two books (both dealing with the rhythmic aspect 
of music), a dozen scholarly articles (dealing with music theory and 
music performance pedagogy), and a dozen editions and arrangements of 
music (mostly from the English and Italian Baroque).  In late 1996, W.W. 
Norton will release the second edition of his book Rhythm Reading: 
Elementary Through Advanced Training, a widely used college textbook.  
Kazez has given talks on his research at twenty-five of the leading U.S. 
schools of music and conservatories, including the New England 
Conservatory, the University of Texas, and the Manhattan School of 
Music.  An enduring student of world music, Dr. Kazez has traveled to 
Java and Bali (where he studied gamelan music, dance, and shadow 
theater) and to Turkey and Greece (where he studied urban folk music).  
He is currently Associate Professor of Music at Wittenberg University.

        Kazez's interest in Jewish music is at once personal and 
professional.  His father, now an eminent physicist, is a Sephardic Jew 
who emigrated to the U.S. from Turkey after World War II in search of 
further education.  His mother, an accomplished artist and 
internationally recognized triathlete, is of Ashkenazic descent.  Dan 
lives in central Ohio with his wife, Anne, who is full-time mother to 
their two young children, Benjamin and Rachel.

        Kazez has been heard by radio and television audiences in the U.S. 
and Europe.  In 1993, his performance of J.S. Bach's first Cello Suite 
was broadcast on the ABC program 20/20, to an audience of over 20 
million.  In May, 1996, Kazez will travel to Asia for a concert tour of 
India, at the invitation of Virgo Music (Bombay) and the Indian Council 
for Cultural Relations (New Delhi).  In Spring of 1997, as a Fulbright 
Scholar, Kazez will teach at Bogazici Universitesi in Istanbul, Turkey.
In June of 1997, with the assistance of a grant from the National 
Endowment for the Arts, he and the Corinthian Chamber Players will
perform Jewish-inspired music in Spain and Morocco.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Daniel (Dan) Kazez                      e-mail:  kazez (at) wittenberg(dot)edu
Associate Professor Music                          tel:  513-327-7354
Wittenberg University                              fax:  513-327-6340

Daniel Kazez / Wittenberg University / Springfield, Ohio 45501  U.S.A.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -