Taking a silver jubilee bow

On Monday, 65 young musicians will turn up at Kibbutz Eilon in the Upper Galilee to attend master classes and one-on-one lessons and to practice and perform in evening concerts.

By BARRY DAVIS
Some 60 young string players from all over the world come to the Keshet Eilon summer course (photo credit: SARIT UZIELI)
Some 60 young string players from all over the world come to the Keshet Eilon summer course
(photo credit: SARIT UZIELI)
Keshet Eilon has a lot to answer for, and all of it good. A quarter of a century ago, an intensive summer program was established at Kibbutz Eilon in the Upper Galilee exclusively for budding classical violinists.
Over the years, the venture has spread its wings numerically and instrumentally, as well as in terms of the geographical hinterland it incorporates.
On Monday, 65 young musicians will turn up at the kibbutz to attend master classes and one-on-one lessons and to practice and perform in evening concerts, based on a program devised by musical director Russian- born violinist and acclaimed teacher Itzhak Rashkovsky.
The inaugural summer course catered to 25 violinists, the majority of whom were Israeli born or new immigrants. The upcoming Keshet Eilon International String Mastercourse, which will run until August 13, will welcome an international lineup of 65 musicians, aged 16 to 26. In addition to practitioners of the instrument for which the summer course was originally conceived, the course now also feature cellists and violists, as well as a group of pianists. The members of the stellar teaching staff come from all over the globe, including the US, Germany, Singapore, Austria and France, in addition to the cream of our own local educators.
The three-week event kicks off on Monday evening with something more than a little outside the strict confines of the classical sphere, even though one of the star performers has close ties with the Kibbutz Eilon program. Now 32 years old, Keren Tenenbaum has come a long way since first setting her infant fingers on a violin. She is now the mother of a twoyear- old girl, not much younger than when she herself first got the notion of playing music.
“I started playing at the age of four,” Tenenbaum recalls. “I started pestering my parents from the age of three. I saw another little girl – she was a bit older than me – playing violin and piano, and from that moment on it became very important for me to play the violin.”
Once bitten, there was no stopping the tiny tot.
“I’d take a cutting board and knives, and anything that somehow looked like a violin and bow combination, and I’d ‘play’ them all day at home,” Tenenbaum continues.
She was clearly one determined young lady. She was not even deterred when she was rejected by a teacher who felt she was too young to start lessons, after her parents eventually became convinced that their daughter’s violinesque antics were not just a passing childish fancy.
Initial rejection notwithstanding, Tenenbaum began formal training based on the Suzuki method, which suited the youngster to a T.
“It helps to develop your musical ear,” notes the violinist. “At the end of the day, that is the most important thing. You need to develop your ear in order to be a musician.”
Tenenbaum made good progress and first benefited from the top-quality instruction offered by Keshet Eilon at the age of 10, when she took part in a junior program. It quickly became clear that Tenenbaum was destined to be a soloist, even though she says she was never competitive. Ambition and drive, she notes, come with the territory.
“That’s the way classical violinists are. And if someone is competitive, it will come out in situations like Keshet Eilon. You’ll see at that at auditions or when an important teacher comes from abroad. But that never suited me,” she says.
She may not have pushed her way to the front of the stage, but that’s where Tenenbaum often found herself.
“I was earmarked for that from an early age,” she says without a hint of hubris. “I also played in ensembles, but I did a lot of solo stuff, too.”
Naturally, being showered with praise from the outset and grabbing the limelight can go to an adolescent’s head, and Tenenbaum says that her eight summers at Keshet Eilon did not always flow smoothly.
“At that age, hormones can take over,” she says. “I was not always well behaved there,” she adds with a smile.
For all her talent and determination – Tenenbaum says she knew she was going to be a professional musician from the age of three – the violinist also admits to having a basic need to change her artistic landscape at regular intervals.
“After about three of four years of doing something, I begin to feel stuck and that it’s like going to work,” she explains.
Sometimes fate also intervenes and gives Tenenbaum a shove in some direction or other. The youngster’s promise led her to landing a spot at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, Dance and Drama in New York. But just as she was beginning to make ripples in the Big Apple, her fiddling arm began to show the worse for intensive wear, and she had to take a break from the violin.
True to her free-flowing credo, Tenenbaum began hook up with more contemporary, and decidedly unclassical, vibes. Today she earns part of her living as a rock singer and violinist. She will appear in next week’s Keshet Eilon opener as a member of double- bass player Gilad Efrat’s band, which includes cellist Hila Epstein and oud player-guitarist Nimrod Atzmon.
Despite the seeming definitive discrepancy between the two genres, Tenenbaum sees an important common denominator between the two genres.
“You express a lot of emotion in both,” she states.
“There are types of music whereby it is difficult to express emotion, but rock and classical music are very much about that. I think it is hard to express emotion, for example, in jazz. Actually, you have the same problem with classical music, too.”
For Tenenbaum, it’s all about letting your hair down.
“I have heard jazz that really touches the soul, but I think that if you break the rules, that’s the coolest thing around,” she asserts.
Tenenbaum has certainly been pushing all kinds of frontiers, and her vocal and instrumental role in Efrat’s band provides her with the perfect vehicle for giving free rein to her emotions.
There are plenty of other entertaining and intriguing items in this year’s Keshet Eilon lineup, including a festive concert featuring some of the program’s most illustrious alumni, such as 40-year-old Russian-born violinist Sergey Ostrovsky; 20-year-old American Esther Yoo, the youngest prizewinner of the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition; and 32-year-old Sayaka Shoji, who was the first Japanese and youngest winner of the Paganini Competition in Genoa, Italy.
Then there is an emotive confluence with the Polyphony Education project from Nazareth, with the Arab and Jewish players of the Polyphony Orchestra joining forces with the Keshet Eilon Ensemble for a concert, while the 25th anniversary Keshet Eilon gala concert will take place at the Opera House in Tel Aviv in the presence of President Reuven Rivlin. In addition to the Keshet Eilon Ensemble, which will play a medley of songs by iconic Russian-born Israeli tunesmith Sasha Argov, the latter event will also feature the famed Moscovia Orchestra from Russia and ensembles of faculty members and students.
For tickets and information about free events: (04) 995- 8131/191 and www.keshetei.org.il/