This year’s International Musical Spring Festival takes place at Kibbutz Kfar
Blum this Thursday-Saturday and offers a wide range of musical entertainment, as
well as some get-out-and-about items over the three days in the verdant
surroundings of the kibbutz and the Upper Galilee.
The professional guest
list features top-flight musicians such as pianist Elisha Abas, Russian-born
British violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky and French pianist Eric Le Sage, in
addition to artistic director and cellist Zvi Plesser. The performance schedule
incorporates works by composers such as Chopin, Brahms, Liszt and Mozart, with
one of the highlights featuring a supergroup synergy between Le Sage,
Sitkovetsky, Plesser and Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) viola player Roman
Spitzer. The quartet will perform Beethoven’s Variations on Mozart’s The Magic
Flute and Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 2, as well as a contemporary work in the
form of Jewish Austrian 20th-century composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Piano
Trio in D major, Op. 1.
One of the most varied concerts will be performed by the Tempera Ensemble, a
quartet established a year ago by IPO trumpeter Yigal Meltzer; pianist Amit
Dolberg; percussionist Tomer Yariv; and saxophonist Gan Lev.
The Tempera
concert on Friday evening covers expansive musical ground, taking in works by
Leonard Bernstein, 20th century Romanianborn Gyorgy Ligeti, John Cage’s vocal
tour de force Story, and jazz guitarist Pat Metheny’s First
Circle.
According to Lev, the foursome is far more than the sum of its
performing parts. “Tempera is a very special entity in that it operates on a
sort of collective basis. We invest whatever revenue we generate in
commissioning new arrangements by composers for our repertoire.”
That,
says the saxophonist, affects increasingly wider circles of
musicians. “Tempera doesn’t just take works and perform them. We create
our programs together, in terms of choosing our repertoire and writing new
arrangements.”
Considering the wide range of the ensemble members’
individual musical avenues, the diverse performance spread is only
natural. The quartet’s International Musical Spring Festival concert also
includes the Finale of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6, arranged by Acre-born
composer Ziv Slama; bassist Noam Weisenberg’s take on Argentinean Nuevo tango
composer Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion; and Meltzer’s arrangement of a piece of
music that may ring familiar for Israelis old enough to remember the halcyon
single channel TV days here.
“We are all of a certain age, and as kids we
all watched [American drama series] Dallas in the 1980s. Everyone watched that
show. Yigal [Meltzer] had a neighbor who used to complain about Yigal playing
the trumpet, so to get his revenge, Yigal went to his neighbor and stood by his
window and played the theme from Dallas. Now that’s the fun part of our
repertoire, which Yigal arranged for us.”
Lev says that for him, Tempera was love at first sound. “I remember, from the
very first time we played together, feeling that I had with me genuine lions of
music,” he recalls. “We rehearsed our first arrangement, of Candide by Leonard
Bernstein, somewhere in Netanya – back then we didn’t have a regular rehearsal
space – and I was blown away by how we all played together, from the very first
bars. That was a great feeling. And we just keep on going from strength to
strength.”
And there is more than “just” quality arrangements and
instrumental interpretation on offer from the quartet.
“In the first
meetings the four of us had, to discuss where we wanted to take Tempera, I said
I wanted our concerts to be performance shows. I wanted us to come out from
behind the role of musicians playing scores, from behind the sheet music, and to
make it into something like a theatrical act,” says Lev, adding that he was
aware that he was aiming to push the boat out, far away from its safe harbor.
“You get classical musicians who, when they just have to say two words in a
concert, find that a much more challenging thing to do than just playing the
compositions. That is something outside their familiar domain of
work.”
Lev’s cohorts initially balked at the idea, but the concept
eventually began to pan out.
“We said we’d start with so-called ‘regular’
concerts but, in fact, they were never ‘regular,’” he says. “We tell stories and
we do the Cage work [Story] with words by [American poet] Gertrude Stein. We
have a lot of fun with our programs.”
The festival program also features
some hands-on activities and other non-concert items, such as a discussion with
Plesser and the festival’s general manager about this summer’s Voice of Music
Festival, which will also be based at the Pastoral Hotel in Kfar Blum; a hotel
lobby gathering with Abas; and a lecture by psychologist Bracha Hadar entitled
“The Drama of the Gifted Child.” Hadar’s talk will be augmented by live
music.
This is, of course, also a good time of year to get out into the
countryside to catch some of the floral explosion underway, and there will be a
trip to a suitably pastoral location in the vicinity of the kibbutz.
For
reservations and additional information: (04) 693-6611; (04) 681- 6640/2; and
www.kol-hamusica.org.il
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