Keshet Eilon standout students to perform in Tel Aviv

The gala concert takes place on Wednesday night at the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center at 8:00 p.m.

By MAXIM REIDER
Leia Zhu and Itzhak Rashkovsky rehearse at the Keshet Eilon String Masterclasses. (photo credit: MAXIM REIDER)
Leia Zhu and Itzhak Rashkovsky rehearse at the Keshet Eilon String Masterclasses.
(photo credit: MAXIM REIDER)
The standout students of the Keshet Eilon String Masterclasses will perform tonight (August 7) in front of a full house at the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center. In the finale of the gala concert, all the participants of the annual international course, which has just ended at the music center in the Galilee, will be joined by their tutors to perform one of the course’s signature ensemble pieces.
Keshet Eilon Music Center and its String Masterclasses was founded some 30 years ago, when in the summer of 1990, the western Galilee Kibbutz Eilon, bordering Lebanon, decided to host a small group of young Israeli violin students and their teachers. The idea founders, kibbutz music teacher Gilad Sheba and London-based violinists Itzhak Rashovsky and his wife Anni Schnarch, was to offer them an opportunity to practice in a quiet countryside atmosphere, far from Tel Aviv suffocating summer heat and the big city’s hustle and bustle.  In its first years Keshet Eilon hosted the students and the faculty members in small simple houses and the concerts took place in a reconstructed kibbutz chicken house.
Over the course of the next three decades, the event has been transformed into an internationally demanded summer school, which operates in a huge contemporary campus, with elegant teachers’ homes, modern students’ dormitories, integrated into the serene mountain landscape. The luxurious concert hall, boasting excellent acoustics, operates year round.
Over the years hundreds of local and international students have gone through Keshet Eilon warm, supportive and inspiring experience, studying with prominent musicians like Ida Haendel and Ivri Gitlis, and becoming Israel’s ambassadors. Today, many of its alumni play in important orchestras  throughout the world, while others have built successful solo careers, or are on the brink of one.
Some of the former students return to the masterclass to pass their knowledge to the younger generation – such violinists Judith Ingolfssohn (Iceland/US), Israeli Sergey Ostrovsky and Vadim Gluzman. A Chicago-based Israeli,  and one of the leading violinists of his generation, Gluzman says that for him “coming back to Eilon is coming back to myself.”
The gala concert takes  place tonight at the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center at 8:00 p.m.
For reservations, call 052-373 8887.