' xiu 3)n Compositions For Clarinet 1W J Soril and Aryeh Sharon & Family Wish All Our Customers, Friends & Relatives A Happy, Healthy and Peaceful New Year We Thank The Entire Community For Its Loyal Support 25050 Southfield Road (at 10 Mile) Phone: (248) 552-0088 Fax: (248) 552-0087 Under Supervision of the Council of Orthodox Rabbis of greater Detroit ALL HEW HOT MEALS SERVED DAILY W ed4,4t9 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. tO %my Ufa i Vlealtitet 'Nero *cwt. Ask about our holiday trays Hours: Mon.-Sat. 7 am-9 pm • Sun. 10 am-9 pm His latest CD, simply titled Feidman and the Israel Cainerata 3426 E. W. Maple just west of Haggerty • Commerce, MI (248) 926-9555 avtuel, Mane_c, Ja9e. alAct. Stott cWisR. -Rein austowlos, 0- aw10,9 atAct. 0- 7Lietiticis t9Le, CVen. Best oty- Jo9 ton a ectrapp9 atAct. cileaPitky (Aeart. , Pistokaikte,Di odesta IN MARKET STREET SHOPPES 29400 NORTHWESTERN HWY. • SOUTHFIELD (248) 358-0344 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.