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Compositions
For Clarinet
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eofest
Brilliance shines
in clarinetist Giora Feidman's latest CD.
SUZANNE WEISS
Special to The Jewish News
I
f Giora Feidman has not yet
been declared an Israeli national
treasure, he ought to be.
The great Argentinean clar-
inetist, who spent some 20 years of his
career performing the classics with the
Israel Philharmonic before rediscover-
ing the klezmer music that is his her-
itage, is arguably the greatest klezmer
musician of our time. And he knows
his way around a tango, too.
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His latest CD, simply titled
Feidman and the Israel Cainerata
3426 E. W. Maple just west of Haggerty • Commerce, MI (248) 926-9555
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9/18
1998
Detroit Jewish News
(Plane; $17.99), is a virtual summa-
tion of his brilliant career. It combines
the music of three serious Israeli corn-
posers, Ora Bat Chaim, Noam Sheriff
and Betty0livero, with four tangos by
the legendary Astor Piazzolla, a
teacher and friend back in Argentina.
And all of it is impeccably performed.
Every composition on the disc,
with the exception of one, "Le Grand
Tango" of Piazzolla, was written for
Feidman.
At 16 minutes, Sheriff's "The
Hassid's Reward" is the centerpiece of
the collection. The mini-concerto pur-
ports to translate the writings of
Martin Buber into a kind of musical
ecstasy. It has moments of sheer
Suzanne Weiss writes for the Jewish
Bulletin of Northern California.
klezmer exuberance but is truly a seri-
ous modern classical work. The solo
clarinet passages are a virtuosic tour-
de-force. At one point the instrument
mimics the call of the shofar; near the
end, it davens, with the same cry in its
voice that has been heard from chaz-
zans down through the centuries.
Bat Chaim's three pieces, the open-
ing selections on the disc, are briefer
and less ambitious but nonetheless
pleasing.
The first, "Friday Night," has the
strongest echoes of klezmer. The other
two, "In the Peaceful Heart" and "Eve
of Receiving the Torah," reflect the
composer's mystical bent. She is a
practitioner of yoga and a student of
Kabbalah.
What's to say about Piazzolla except
that he has raised the Argentinean
national dance from a low pursuit to a
high art form? "Le Grand Tango,"
originally composed for famed cellist
Mstislav Rostropovich and transcribed
here for clarinet, is the first of four
tangos on the disc and long enough to
be considered, if not a concerto, at
least a rhapsody
The brief, jazzy "Tempo di Tango"
that follows is more typical of the
genre. Yet Piazzolla's music is not typi-
cal ballroom tango — nothing cheap,
trashy or sentimental here — but sym-
phonic tango. Just as George
Gershwin took the American jazz
idiom and wove it into a symphonic
setting in his piano concertos or the
"Rhapsody in Blue," Piazzolla trans-
forms the tango into something larger
than itself.
Betty Olivero's five-part suite,
"Mizrach," is the most symphonic and
purely contemporary of the selections
on the disc. Olivero, who composed
the score for the silent film The
Golem, also recorded by Feidman, is a
recipient of the Leonard Bernstein fel-
lowship at Tanglewood and was for
some years a student of Luciano Berio.
Throughout, the work of the Israel
Camerata, under its permanent con-
ductor Avner Biron, is fine. This disc
is a keeper.