Ode for a festival

With live web broadcasts and a gala concert at Beit Avi Chai, the Piyut Festival is stepping up the volume this year.

By BARRY DAVIS
Alma Zohar 521 (photo credit: Courtesy of Zohar Ron)
Alma Zohar 521
(photo credit: Courtesy of Zohar Ron)
If the fourth edition of the annual Piyut (Liturgical Ode) Festival, hosted by Beit Avi Chai and artistically overseen by Yair Harel, is anything to go by, the musical sector is definitely on the upswing.
Beit Avi Chai director Danny Danieli is, to say the least, delighted with the way things have panned out in the last three years, and the program for this year’s festival (September 19-22) certainly reflects that growth continuum.
“We have two more events,” says Danieli adding, however, that the progress achieved is not just a matter of size or quantitative expansion. “We have greatly extended our geographical sphere of activities. This year we have things lined up in Gilo, Kiryat Hayovel and Nahlaot. Last year we had some events in Kiryat Hayovel and very low-key stuff in Nahlaot, but this year we have significantly upgraded the festival activity in Nahlaot.”
The latter includes concerts at a couple of synagogues in the picturesque neighborhood – Sha’arei Rahamim (a.k.a. Bana) and Hessed Verahamim – and walking tours of the area.
Danieli is keen to point out that the festival’s extramural activities are not a proverbial matter of bringing the mountain to Muhammad. “I think there is something very apt in bringing piyutim to the neighborhoods.
The neighborhoods have paytanim (liturgical singers) and choirs that perform liturgical material so, through the festival, we are trying to reflect what they do themselves in their own backyard. It’s not that they don’t make it to Beit Avi Chai, it’s a matter of encouraging them and supporting what they do themselves. That’s definitely an ideological orientation for us,” he says.
The musical entertainment in Gilo includes contributions from the Community Administration Orchestra and a vocal and instrumental ensemble from the Beit Israel urban kibbutz in Gilo.
The musical hinterland covered by the festival has also evolved over the years. This year’s line-up, in addition to some cantorial and liturgical singers, includes a host of rock artists, such as Eran Tzur, Efrat Gosh, Kobi Oz and Alma Zohar. The rockers will take part in the suitably titled Piyut and Roll concert in the Beit Avi Chai inner courtyard at 8:30 p.m. on September 22.
The festival publicity blurb points out that: “the uniqueness of the Piyut Festival is reflected in its ability to bring together artists from different sectors of Israeli society who do not normally meet, to cooperate on an artistic and spiritual level.”
That is a sentiment with which Zohar says she readily identifies. “I think all artists, to some extent, engage in spiritual matters. There is something in music that takes you there.”
Zohar, like Tzur and Gosh, is not normally associated with liturgical activity but says she was drawn into it by a liturgical artist with some seemingly, for Zohar, incongruous ethnic background. “I have been involved for some time in a Hillel House project that brings rock musicians together with liturgical singers, and that brought me to the Beit Avi Chai evening in the festival,” she explains. “I got together with a Yemenite singer named Shlomit Levy, and I really like Yemenite liturgical music.”
Then again, Zohar, who is Ashkenazi, doesn’t exactly come from the same ethnic neck of the woods, although there was some common ground from the outset. “Funnily enough, when I started with the Hillel House project, the only liturgical music I knew was Yemenite songs,” she says. “I actually connect with this material more in terms of the language and less from the musical side. I’m not too good when it comes to trilling, but I manage the material in my own way.”
Zohar says she’s not too concerned that the Beit Avi Chai audience might be disappointed with her – in pure ethnic terms – less-than-perfect delivery.
“The people who come to a show called ‘Piyut and Roll’ have some idea of what to expect. They know they’re going to get a hybrid of different styles. I do this my own way.”
In addition to the neighborhood extramural activities, there will also be a gala concert at the Gerard Behar Center with stellar 68-year-old Moroccan-born liturgical singer-cantor Rabbi Haim Louk, together with the New Jerusalem Orchestra. There will also be shows that draw from the liturgical canons of Iraqi, Ladino and Turkish traditions.
Beit Avi Chai is certainly getting some well-rounded support for the festival with its other collaborators in art, including the Education Ministry, the Ministry of Culture and Sport, the Jerusalem Municipality’s Culture and Arts Department, the National Library, Hillel House and the IBA’s Voice of Music radio channel.
Danieli says that he and Harel endeavored to address as many areas of liturgical music and to reflect the widespread activity in which musicians of all ilk within the wider realms of the genre engage.
“The concert with Rabbi Haim Louk will be something of a grand affair, with an audience of 600. But there is also something quite intimate about liturgical music too, so we wanted to have the locally based events in the festival as well. The encounters in the synagogues [in Nahlaot] come straight from the very core of the tradition.”
In addition to the sonic entertainment, this year’s festival also features an exhibition of works of art at Beit Avi Chai that were inspired by liturgical music.
“I must admit that I was a bit skeptical about having an exhibition like that as part of the festival,” says Danieli, “but it opened a few days ago to a tremendous response. This kind of music, this cultural phenomenon, appeals to a lot of people.”
This year for the first time, Beit Avi Chai will try to reach a far wider audience beyond the thousands expected to attend the various concerts, tours and other activities in Jerusalem.
“We will broadcast six events, live via our website, with the help of our partners the Jewish Agency, Alliance Israélite Universelle and the community center association. I would like to see at least 5,000 people viewing the events for half an hour, but it is difficult to know how many people will actually avail themselves of the online service. Naturally, the broadcasts will also be available to anyone anywhere in the world,” says Danieli. •

For tickets and more information: 621-5900 and www.bac.org.il