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PMH News and Reviews
The Washington Post: Pro Musica Hebraica presents the Biava Quartet
By Joan Reinthaler
The Washington Post
April 29, 2010
In the three years since its founding, Pro Musica Hebraica, an organization dedicated to bringing neglected Jewish music to the concert hall, has produced two concerts a year of uncommon interest. Thursday’s program, in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, featured the Biava Quartet and the music they played, all French and most of it from the first half of the 20th century, offered a mix of French instrumental color and Jewish earthiness in proportions that varied from piece to piece but that served each composer well.
The program notes describe Alexandre Tansman’s Quartet No. 5 as "grappling with the brutal reality of chaos and evil exploding into his world" (World War II). If so, Tansman must have had a lively but benign view of evil. An insistent and hard-edged first movement, the closest he comes to brutality, leads to a delicate, calm and reflective second. The third movement is one of the most vivid musical evocations of a train ride, complete with passing landscape, I have ever heard, and the fourth is a splendidly complex and angular fugue. No chaos there. The Biava musicians played it with a terrific combination of impetuousness and control, with bow-weights of every attack carefully matched.
The Wall Street Journal: Pro Musica Hebraica "highlight[s] an overlooked aspect of Jewish culture"
By Bari Weiss
The Wall Street Journal
November 26, 2009
Charles Krauthammer's office in Washington does not lack for artifacts. He obviously cherishes the snapshot of himself with a laughing Ronald Reagan and the board where he plays chess with Natan Sharansky. But the room's centerpiece is the sepia photograph of a serious-looking man in a fur hat. He was a chief rabbi of Krakow—and Mr. Krauthammer's great-great-grandfather. Mr. Krauthammer is not a believer, but the affinity across the generations is strong. "I consider myself a Shinto Jew," he tells me. "I engage in ancestor worship."
Mr. Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist and Fox News analyst, grew up in Montreal in a modern-Orthodox home. By the age of 16 he was no longer living a religious life, but a class on Maimonides at McGill University brought him back into the fold. It was there that he understood for the first time "that Jewish philosophy was not parochial, was not superstitious, but was at the level of the great philosophies of Western culture."
This "moment of revelation" renewed in Mr. Krauthammer "a sense of wonder about Jewish tradition and culture" even as his career took him into the world of political commentary. His great-great-grandfather, he jokes, "spent his life writing commentaries on the Torah. I spend my life writing commentaries on New York Times editorials—which is an argument against evolution."
The Washington Post: Apollo Ensemble's riffs bring out fun in violinist's sonatas
By Joan Reinthaler
The Washington Post
November 7, 2009
In many ways, Salamone Rossi's life bridged two worlds. A Jewish composer who lived in Mantua at the turn of the 18th century, he wrote music for the synagogue that was comfortably in the idiom of high Renaissance church music and secular pieces that were unmistakably Baroque. (The great musicologist Gustave Reese has noted that in his sacred motets the music ran as usual from left to right, but the Hebrew text under them ran from right to left -- undoubtedly a challenge for the singers).
The Apollo Ensemble, a European chamber orchestra of Baroque specialists directed by violinist David Rabinovich, brought two of his delightful trio sonatas to their program of Jewish Baroque music at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater Thursday (presented by Pro Musica Hebraica). Scored for harpsichord and two violins, these are playful pieces, full of ornamental riffs, alternating sections of soulful declamation and athletic competition between the violin lines, and with melodies that are full of both English folk flavor and early Italian opera conventions. The performances, on gut strings played without vibrato, were agile and elegant. Rhythmic inflections were handled with restraint. The ensemble was seamless, and a sense of humor, unassuming but pervasive, drew appreciative noises from the audience.
The Jerusalem Post: Preserver of Jewish music
By Hilary Leilea Krieger
The Jerusalem Post
June 10, 2009
Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist who quit a job as the chief resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1970s to find work sharing his views with a global audience (his op-eds are carried in The Jerusalem Post among other publications), does not want to talk about himself or his political opinions.
Instead, the 59-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner wants to discuss the music program he and his wife recently started to try to revive and preserve Jewish music that has been lost to the masses. "Pro Musica Hebraica," as it's called, just finished its first season to critical acclaim, and Krauthammer is looking to raise awareness about the project as it gears up for its second year.
He points to many styles and eras that are neglected these days - the victim of times both banal and horrific. Though the first season focused on Eastern European 20th-century themes, Krauthammer would like to present a wide variety of works in coming concerts, including Ladino, Dutch cantorial and baroque Jewish pieces - the latter of which, he noted, "many people think is an oxymoron: baroque Jewish, what does that apply to, Jackie Mason?"
So if submitting to an interview is what he has to do, so be it. And, agreeing to submit, he does so good-naturedly. The sharp, commanding strokes of a pen that doesn't refrain from taking the powers-that-be to task - a recent column explained why he rejected an invitation to a White House stem cell bill signing ceremony - belie a warm, amiable, humorous person. Of course, for all Krauthammer's strong neoconservative convictions, tempered though they might be with support for abortion rights and other socially liberal positions, he was raised in Canada.
Baltimore Sun: Pro Musica Hebraica performs 'lost' Jewish works
By Tim Smith
Baltimore Sun
March 12, 2009
For all of its celebrated universality, the language of music speaks with many different accents. A century ago, a group of Russian composers set out to explore one such accent by forming the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg, with the encouragement of such luminaries as Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Over the ensuing decades, for a variety of reasons, the products of these "St. Petersburg school" composers were mostly forgotten - an undeserved fate that is being vigorously reversed by a man better known for his deftly argued political opinions from a generally conservative perspective.
"Five or six years ago, my wife and I heard about the St. Petersburg school from a cantor who played a very scratchy recording of some pieces that we thought were really wonderful," says Charles Krauthammer, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post. "We felt we should really do something to bring this music to the fore."
The result is an organization called Pro Musica Hebraica, which bowed last April at the Kennedy Center with a concert featuring celebrated violinist Itzhak Perlman and the Biava Quartet in works by Alexander Krein, Joel Engel, Solomon Rosowsky and more.
Next week, for the second and final program of the 2009-2010 season, the Biava Quartet returns for a program of works by several more of those pioneering St. Petersburg composers, including Joseph Achron, Leo Zeitlin, Michel Michelet and Alexander Zhitomirsky.
Pulse: Reviving virtually unknown Jewish music is couple's labor of love
By Ellyn Wexler
Pulse
March 11, 2009
Some would say that Robyn and Charles Krauthammer do too much, but that's clearly not the Chevy Chase couple's perspective.
"We have made it a point in life to do things we really love... Work done in that spirit is not burdensome. It's actually enjoyable," explains Robyn Krauthammer on behalf of the duo that has found time amid impressive and non-musical professional careers to create Pro Musica Hebraica (PMH), an organization that brings lost and rarely performed works of Jewish art music to contemporary audiences.
"Through the centuries and across the globe, Jewish composers have created a rich repertoire of concert music that interweaves the sacred and the secular, folk and liturgical themes into one sophisticated artistic tradition," according to PMH's mission statement. The organization seeks to represent these composers, their descendants and those they influenced, especially Dmitrii Shostakovich, "as passionate modern artists who embrace the challenge of expressing their Jewishness through the creative medium of music."
"We both love this project deeply, and we simply find the time one way or the other, despite our obligations," says Australian-born Robyn Krauthammer, an attorney turned painter and sculptor who exhibits at the District's Foxhall Gallery. Her husband, who holds a medical degree from Harvard, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, and a weekly panelist on "Inside Washington."
The Washington Post: The Biava Quartet at the Kennedy Center
By Joe Banno
The Washington Post
March 20, 2009
Shostakovich's music opened the Pro Musica Hebraica-sponsored recital by the Biava Quartet at the Terrace Theater on Thursday. It was his Fourth String Quartet, infused with Russian-Jewish folk music and a notably gentler score than some of his other, anguished works in that form. The other four composers on the program, however, were names few listeners today would know.
They were all members of the so-called St. Petersburg school of composition (students at that Russian city's music conservatory who were urged by teachers such as Rimsky-
Korsakov to delve into their Jewish roots for source music). There were stylistic differences in the ways these composers incorporated folk songs. The pungent tonality and intricately woven lines of Joseph Achron's "Four Improvisations," for instance, sounded miles away from the heavy-breathing chromaticism of Aleksandr Zhitomirskii's "The Rabbi's Melody."
But nearly all the pieces seemed to speak slowly, mournfully and in a minor key, and the hangdog mood became a little oppressive by evening's end. Even Leo Zeitlin's "Five Songs From the Yiddish" -- sung by two fine, expressive singers, Rachel Calloway (mezzo) and Alexander Tall (baritone) -- managed to deconstruct some customarily lively tunes into angular, depressive tone poems. Ironically, it was a piece called "Elegie" (a piano quintet, enlivened by the colorful keyboard work of Konstantin Soukhovetski) that proved a buoyant exception. Written by Oscar-winning film-noir composer Michel Michelet (born Mikhail Levin), it sounded like Ravel in Russian clothing.
Whatever the mood proffered by these scores, however, the Biava players delivered a beautifully lean, manicured sound all evening.
All Arts Review: Pro Musica Hebraica, The Biava Quartet
By Stephen Neal Dennis
All Arts Review
March 19, 2009
In a city bracing for seemingly inevitable cultural cut-backs, suspensions and extinctions, the audacity of sustaining the emergence of an entirely new musical organization must be applauded. The Baltimore Opera Company has moved into liquidation, and Washington's Master Chorale plans to suspend operations. But Charles Krauthammer and his wife Robyn Krauthammer have boldly created Pro Musica Hebraica to perform and "recover" Jewish classical music.
Last night the group's third performance nearly filled the seats of the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater for a stimulating concert that opened with Shostakovich's Quartet No. 4 in D major, a20string quartet that would have been deeply offensive to Stalin because of its obvious reliance on Jewish folk music. The piece received its first public performance four years after it was written, following the death of Stalin. Violinist Adam Hartman and his companions in the Biava Quartet emphasized the melodic splendors of this piece, which may have startled some in the audience accustomed to a Shostakovich often more sarcastically bombastic or hesitatingly propagandistic.
The four remaining composers represented on the program all had Russian roots, and two had been part of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. As in gold mining, the recovery of forgotten music can entail a great deal of excavation for the release of very little of true value. This seemed to be the case with Joseph Achron's Four Improvisations of 1927. Not particularly Jewish in melodic content, and certainly not very Russian in sound (having been written after Achron had arrived in Los Angeles to work for Hollywood film studios), this piece seemed to demonstrate20only a particular tenacity of intention by the programmers. Not having been performed "in possibly over eighty years," its violently episodic nature offered little to link it to the rest of the program.
Moment: New Life for Lost Jewish Music
By Eileen Lavine
Moment Magazine
January/February 2009
It was Robyn Krauthammer who came up with the idea for what was to become Pro Musica Hebraica - a project to revive forgotten Jewish classical music from a century ago. A lawyer turned painter and sculptor, Robyn converted to Judaism before her marriage to Charles Krauthammer, the influential conservative columnist. "She is more Jewish than I am," Charles says, smiling at his wife. "She has a real love and feeling for it."
Pro Musica Hebraica grew out of a conversation Robyn had with the cantor at the couple's Maryland synagogue about lost Jewish music. "I was intrigued when he told us that the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov criticized his Jewish students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory for not applying their own heritage to their music," she says, "so they formed the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music in 1908."
Charles interjects: "Originally, they called it the Society for Jewish Music, but one of the tsar's bureaucrats couldn't imagine that Jews were capable of classical music, so he added ‘folk' to the name."
Most of this rich, passionate Jewish music was suppressed by the Communists when they came to power and was never performed. To rescue the repertoire from oblivion and bring it to the stage, the Krauthammers founded Pro Musica Hebraica in 2004. They began by recruiting James Loeffler, an assistant professor of European Jewish history at the University of Virginia, as research director. Loeffler combed through the archives of the former Soviet Union for unpublished manuscripts and recordings. "Ironically, much of the music survived because the Soviets saved all the paper, locking it up in benign neglect," he says. "I was able to unlock it because there were librarians who held on to it for decades."
The Washington Post: ARC, Peering Into the Shadows
By Rebecca J. Ritzel
The Washington Post
Thursday, November 20, 2008; Page C4
In 1941, a Polish musical genius fled his country for the hills of Uzbekistan. There in Tashkent, Mieczyslaw (or Moisey) Weinberg began churning out the first of his 22 symphonies and 17 string quartets. Given that Weinberg never fared well with the Stalinists, few pieces received significant premieres. "What was performed," he would later say of his music, "was performed due to a performer's express desire."
Twelve years after the composer's death, Weinberg's music still relies on advocates like the ARC Ensemble. On Tuesday night at the Kennedy Center, Pro Musica Hebraica presented the ARC, an impressive group of musicians who teach at the Royal Conservatory and Glenn Gould School in Toronto. Though the program of Jewish-themed works also included brief pieces by Szymon Laks, Sándor Vándor and Prokofiev, this was Weinberg's night.
Well acquainted with Shostakovich and influenced by Bartók, Weinberg wrote complex neoclassical works interwoven with folk themes. Clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeñas and pianist Dianne Werner tackled the Clarinet Sonata, a piece that evokes klezmer without ever sounding kitsch. Valdepeñas maintained consistent tone while vastly varying his expression, from the tuneful first movement to the more torrid and mournful music that followed.
Weinberg's Piano Quintet, both epic and episodic, kept listeners in suspense. There's a bizarre Gypsy waltz in the third movement, a poignant piano solo in the fourth and a delightful folk dance for two violins in the finale. Weinberg wrote the quintet in 1944, while his relatives were dying in Poland. As this powerful performance conveyed, Weinberg's music is equal parts grief and nostalgia.
By Celia Sharpe
All Arts Review
Pro Musica Hebraica presented the ARC Ensemble (Artists of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Canada) in a unique evening of 20th century Jewish Soviet music. The event, chaired by Charles Kauthhammer, was an opportunity to hear rare pieces performed perfectly by an outstanding ensemble of chamber musicians.
The main attraction was Mieczslaw Weinberg's "Piano Quintet Op. 18," written when the composer first arrived in Moscow in 1943 at age 25, and before he came under the influence of Shostakovich. The work is not only historically interesting but a fascinating work. Shostakovich himself liked to play Weinberg's music and one can understand why, especially when Benjamin Bowman on the violin brought forth some of the most stunning moments of the dramatically powerful piece.
Weinberg's "Sonata for Clarinet and Piano" was a fine example of a discrete use of an instrument associated with klezmer music, as well as an excellent selection for clarinetist Joaquin Valdenpenas's display of rare musical skills.
A rare treat was a piece for piano and cello recently discovered by ARC by the once popular but now unheard of composer, Sandor Vandor, a Hungarian-Jewish composer who died in the Holocaust.
Prokofiev's "Overture on Hebrew Themes" was the exception on the program, as it was pre-Holocaust and by a non-Jewish composer.
The Washington Post: Breathing New Life Into Lost Jewish Music
By Daniel Ginsburg
The Washington Post
Saturday, April 12, 2008; Page C4
Pro Musica Hebraica, a concert series dedicated to exploring lost Jewish music, had a successful inaugural concert on Thursday evening at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.
Jewish music can mean a lot of things, and the program smartly centered on a group of self-defined Jewish composers from 1908 St. Petersburg. Youthful Juilliard School ensembles and violin luminary Itzhak Perlman gave wonderfully prepared and vibrant performances of each score, most of which have likely not been heard in more than half a century.
The personal foundation of Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer and his wife, Robyn, is underwriting the series, and the sold-out audience was filled with fellow conservative pundits, along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Listeners warmly greeted the introductory remarks and the solid musicmaking.
The St. Petersburg composers, members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, brought stylized rhythms and modern sounds to traditional tunes. In Alexander Krein's "Jewish Sketches" No. 2, Op. 13, an earthy melody once commonly heard in Eastern European shtetls is first cloaked in thick textures and stretched to abstraction, but later becomes more recognizable.
The clarinet is closely associated with this music, and the instrumentation for clarinet and string quartet further revealed the music's klezmer origins. The same forces -- the Biava Quartet and clarinetist Tibi Cziger -- gave a beautifully paced and colorful reading of contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov's "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind," which applies more astringent harmonies.
Joel Engel's "Dybbuk Suite," Op. 35, incidental music from a forgotten play, arched from weighty darkness toward light and freedom, while the N-E-W Trio, a polished piano trio, gave a lithe and flowing account of Solomon Rosowsky's "Fantastic Dance," Op. 6, and Mikhail Gnesin's Piano Trio, Op. 63.
With that well-known elegiac sound, Perlman and longtime accompanying pianist Rohan De Silva brought out the nostalgic quality of Leo Zietlin's "Lament, O Zion."
By the end, it was hard to disagree with the idea that these composers make up a definable school. The continual display of the ties that bind made for something of a uniform evening, but it was an auspicious start in any case.
More PMH News and Reviews
An Evening of French-Jewish Music, Powerline Blog, April 30, 2010
Pro Musica Hebraica, Powerline Blog, November 5, 2009
Classical Conversations, WETA (Scroll down page for Classical Conversations host Deb Lamberton’s interview with Charles Krauthammer)
Exploring a world of "Jewish Music", Anne Midgette, Washington Post
Concert Brings Jewish Composers to Fore, Emily Cary, The Examiner
A Fresh Hearing for Forgotten Jewish Composers, Julliard Journal Online
Post Columnist Starts Jewish Music Project, The Forward
Reviving lost, neglected Jewish classical music, Washington Jewish Week
"The Blog at 16th and Q" reviews the PMH website
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