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Pro Musica Hebraica

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Pro Musica Hebraica
Formation2004
TypeNot-for-profit organization
PurposeBringing Jewish music to the concert hall
Chairman of the Board/Co-Founder
Charles Krauthammer
Chief Executive Officer/Co-Founder
Robyn Krauthammer
Executive Director
Hillel Ofek
Board of Advisers
James Conlon, James Loeffler, Simon Wynberg
Websitepromusicahebraica.org

Pro Musica Hebraica (PMH) is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is "to present Jewish classical music – much of it lost or forgotten – in a concert hall setting." Since April 2008, Pro Musica Hebraica has presented 10 concerts, typically two per year at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The concert series featured critically acclaimed performances by Itzhak Perlman, the ARC Ensemble of Canada, the Apollo Ensemble of Amsterdam, Jascha Nemtsov, and Marc-André Hamelin, among others.

History

Founded in 2004, Pro Musica Hebraica was the idea of lawyer-turned-artist Robyn Krauthammer, who recognized that there is a rich tradition of Jewish music that is unjustly neglected, even within the Jewish community, and that deserves be recovered and appreciated by the general public as great music worthy of the concert hall.[1] As her husband (and PMH cofounder), Charles Krauthammer, put it, "when people hear ‘Jewish music,’ they think Israeli folk-dancing -- ‘Hava Nagila’ -- they think of liturgical music, they think of Kol Nidre, they might think of klezmer and that's it. It turns out there's a great, rich tradition of classical Jewish music people just don't know about.”[2] They presented the idea of twice yearly concerts of these undeservedly neglected masterpieces to Kennedy Center Director Michael Kaiser, who offered his immediate encouragement and support.[3] Pro Musica Hebraica was formed and made its debut in the Terrace Theatre at the Kennedy Center on April 10, 2008 with a concert featuring Itzhak Perlman and the Juilliard players honoring the 100th anniversary of the St. Petersburg school of Jewish composers.[4]

Mission

Pro Musica Hebraica defines its mission as aspiring “to expose our audience to the magnificent range of Jewish music and to present Jewish composers not as cultural curiosities or ethnic heroes, but as passionate modern artists who embrace the challenge of expressing their Jewishness through the creative medium of music.”[5] As the founders emphasize, this mission is flexible, not focusing on a single region or style, and less on DNA than sensibility—an attachment, feeling, or concern with Jewish experience Jewish destiny.[6] One of Pro Musica Hebraica’s primary goals is education – training a new generation of musicians to learn the works while leading new audiences to appreciate the Jewish tradition and Jewish music. "If only a few of these compositions end up in the canon," Charles Krauthammer says, "it will be a great achievement."[7]

Inaugural Concert

Pro Musica Hebraica’s first concert (on April 10th, 2008) featured musicians from the Juilliard School and Itzhak Perlman as a special guest. It celebrated the centenary of the 1908 Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg, a group of self-defined Jewish composers from Russia and the first association devoted to Jewish musical traditions. Responding to the challenge of European nationalism, the St. Petersburg Society “gave rise to what would become known as Jewish art music—music that deliberately melded Western and Russian classical music with Hasidic melodies, Yiddish folk songs and synagogue chants, capturing the sounds of the towns and villages of the Pale of Settlement.”[8] As Charles Krauthammer explained, “It's music that's either consciously or unconsciously drawn from the folk, the klezmer, the liturgical, the shtetl,” and reinterpreted in the spirit of “modern classical sensibility.”[9] The concert presented the forgotten works of composers Joel Engel, Solomon Rosowsky, and Alexander Krein. The embrace of Jewish music by these composers influenced the likes of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Reception

Reviews of the concert series have been quite positive. For example, in a review of the inaugural concert, the Washington Post wrote that PMH’s inaugural concert was “an auspicious start” to an organization that is “breathing new life into lost Jewish music.”[10] PMH’s Fall 2008 concert—which featured the performance of the ARC Ensemble of Toronto and the music of “last century’s least-known Jewish geniuses,” Mieczsław Weinberg—was called a “powerful performance.”[11] PMH’s Fall 2010 concert—which focused on the work of Karel Berman, Paul Ben-Haim, and Walter Braunfels—was lauded as “enthralling mix” that “riveted the audience's attention.”[12] Its Fall 2011 concert, which included works by Alexander Krein, was described as reflecting “romantic longing and peasant energy, the imperatives of both dance and religion and a reverence for history, all couched in the modality and the emphatic rhythms that characterize so much of what we recognize as a Jewish musical tradition.”[13] Its most recent, Spring 2012 concert, featuring Marc-Andre Hamelin, was praised by Anne Midgette, chief media critic for the Washington Post, as “an intimate and engaging concert” with a “refreshingly intriguing program.”[14] She wrote: “Hamelin did an outstanding job bringing across a lot of unfamiliar music to the audience,” adding: “Hamelin proceeded to play [the second encore] so engagingly that the audience was laughing along with some of the more extreme variations…and jumped to its feet when he was done.”[15]

Composers

  • Anonymous (Dio Clemenza e Rigore, Hoshana Rabbah in Casale Monferrato, 1733)

Musicians

References

  1. ^ http://momentmag.com/Exclusive/2009/2009-02/200902-JewishEnterprise.html
  2. ^ http://www.jpost.com/Features/InTheSpotlight/Article.aspx?id=145121
  3. ^ http://ww2.gazette.net/stories/03112009/entecol122332_32473.shtml
  4. ^ http://promusicahebraica.org/our-concert-series/concerts/inaugural-concert/
  5. ^ http://promusicahebraica.org/about-pro-musica-hebraica/mission-statement/
  6. ^ http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=145121
  7. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/08/AR2008040802916.html
  8. ^ http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2009/02/JewishEnterprise.html
  9. ^ http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=145121
  10. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103538.html
  11. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/19/AR2008111904038.html
  12. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111906107.html
  13. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/pianist-jascha-nemtsov-plays-folk-influenced-music-by-jewish-composers/2011/11/04/gIQAY2GGnM_story.html
  14. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/classical-beat/post/links-hamelin-pierrot-and-the-kencen-players/2012/04/05/gIQAYQGhxS_blog.html
  15. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterainment/music/marc-andre-hamelin-played-an-intimate-but-engaging-concert/2012/04/03/gIQAUPQ1tS_story.html
  • Midgette, Anne (April 9, 2008). "Exploring a World Of 'Jewish Music'". The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. p. C.5. Retrieved May 25, 2012.
  • ((cite news

|url=http://forward.com/articles/12988/post-columnist-starts-jewish-music-project-by-ezra-/ |title=Post Columnist Starts Jewish Music Project |first=Ezra |last=Glinter |date=March 20, 2008 |newspaper=The Jewish Daily Forward |accessdate=May 25, 2012}}

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