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AMRAM: Songs of the Soul / Shir L'erev Shabbat / The Final Ingredient




Total playing time: 01:02:48

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DAVID AMRAM: THREE WORKS



DAVID AMRAM (b. 1930)


SYMPHONY--SONGS OF THE SOUL (1986-87)             


SHIR L'EREV SHABBAT (SABBATH EVENING SERVICE) (excerpts) (1961)  


THE FINAL INGREDIENT (excerpts) (1965)                      



A unique figure among living American musicians, and a pioneer in exploring and assimilating authentic native musical cultures from around the world, composer, instrumentalist, conductor and music director David Amram (b. 1930) has embraced a multitude of traditions and disciplines--classical, jazz, folk, and ethnic--in the conviction that all music is interrelated.  His preoccupation with ethnic rhythms and sonorities as well as with non-Western forms permeates nearly all of his music, providing inspiration and basic material for his formal compositions.  Amram's development reflects these inclinations: he studied composition with Vittorio Giannini and Gunther Schuller, and while conducting with Dimitri Mitropoulos at the Manhattan School of Music, worked with jazz legends including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton before forming his own jazz quintet.  Among his more than 100 orchestral and chamber works are a number of compositions with Judaically related themes.  While not raised in a religious household, he learned Hebrew and absorbed elements of the Jewish musical tradition from his father and Zionist grandfather. 



In the words of Milken Archive Artistic Director Neil Levin, David Amram's three-movement "symphony," Songs of the Soul (1986-87),

represents the composer's "personal perception of potential synergies among otherwise disparate musical traditions and styles," in this case within the boundaries of world Jewish cultures.  The composer himself remarked, "This time I wanted to do a piece that reflected the polycultural nature of the Jewish people as a nomadic people."  His work reflects the growing interest in non-Western ethnic Jewish communities and cultures of central Asia, North Africa and the near East that arose in the late 1960s, following the Six Day War.  The first movement, Incantation, is freely based on a traditional chant used by Ethiopian Jews (Falasha) at their Passover seders.  The lyrical second movement, Niggun (lit., melody), was conceived by the composer as a "song without words."  Its principal melody, while original, stems from eastern and Central European liturgical and folk traditions--Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Romanian--and is transformed and varied throughout.  The third movement, Freilekh--Dance of Joy, fuses eastern European klezmer inflections with a Yemenite sacred tune and a Sephardi secular folksong, all under a Yiddish title denoting a typical high-spirited dance.  The conclusion of this rondo finale features a recapitulation of all themes from the preceding movements.  Christopher Wilkens conducts the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin.



Shir L'erev Shabbat (1961), a Sabbath eve service for cantor, choir and organ, constitutes Amram's major foray into sacred music.  Like so many Sabbath services by 20th-century American composers, it was commissioned by Cantor David J. Putterman at New York's Park Avenue Synagogue as part of their extraordinary program to encourage creation of Jewish liturgical settings on the highest level.  (Other works commissioned under this program, by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Darius Milhaud, Hermann Berlinski and David Diamond, can be heard on previous Milken Archive releases.)  The composer described the experience of writing his Sabbath eve service as a "delayed bar mitzvah."  (He did not have a formal ceremony at the usual age of 13 because his father was serving in World War II.)  Amram did not incorporate preexisting material in this work or base it on traditional prayer modes, but rather relied on the rhythms and emotional implications of the words themselves to generate the musical ideas.  A three-note motif spanning a major ninth serves as a unifying device throughout.  Tenor Richard Troxell and the BBC Singers are conducted by Kenneth Kiesler.



David Amram's opera, The Final Ingredient was commissioned and broadcast in 1965 by the ABC television network in cooperation with the Jewish Theological Seminary; three scenes are presented on this Milken Archive disc.  The opera takes place at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; while the Holocaust provides the specific setting and situation, this is really a drama about faith, Jewish survival and, above all, the triumph of the spirit over degradation and brutality.  At Passover in 1944, a group of Belsen inmates decide, despite life-threatening odds, to improvise a seder--the annual Passover home ritual that recounts the biblical story of the ancient Israelites' exodus from Egypt and liberation from slavery.  The inmates' determination represents their refusal to accept defeat or renounce their identity.  To conduct the ceremony, the prisoners must assemble the prescribed elements of the seder table, which of necessity can only be only metaphoric versions of the traditional symbols.  They manage to find something to represent all but one of the items: the egg that memorializes the sacrificial offering in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem and that also traditionally serves as a symbol of regeneration and continuity.



Just outside the barbed-wire fence of the compound stands a small tree holding a bird's nest with eggs.  One of the inmates tries to persuade a young man named Aaron to risk climbing the fence to procure one of the eggs.  Aaron, however, has rejected Judaism in opposition to his father's religious convictions; succumbing to total despair, he sees no purpose in holding a seder.  It is only after the son witnesses his father's brutal beating that, in a moment of revelation, he scales the fence, snatches the egg, and is shot and killed by the guards as he returns with his prize.  In the last of three scenes from The Final Ingredient excerpted on this Milken Archive recording, the camp inmates celebrate a poignant seder, using Aaron's rope belt as a symbol of the sacrificial lamb and the egg he procured at such great cost as a symbol of eternal Jewish survival.  Kenneth Kiesler conducts soloists with the University of Michigan Opera Chorus and Orchestra.



David Amram's compositions include numerous theater, film and television scores, including music for 25 New York Shakespeare Festival productions; the Pulitzer Prize-winning incidental music for Archibald MacLeish's drama J.B.; and the film scores for The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor in the Grass.  During the 1966-67 season, he was appointed by Leonard Bernstein as the first participant in the new composer-in-residence program at the New York Philharmonic.  Dedicated to increasing musical awareness among young people, he served as music director of the young people's and family concert programs for the Brooklyn Philharmonic for more than 25 years.


Disc 1


    Shiray Neshama (Songs of the Soul) (more info)
    Performed by: Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
    Composed by: David Amram
    Conducted by: Christopher Wilkins
    Recording date: Apr-1999
    Produced by: Nehls, Wolfram

  1. Incantation - 05:39
  2. Song without Words - 10:50
  3. Dance of Joy - 13:54


    4. Shir L'erev Shabbat (excerpts) (more info)
    Composed by: David Amram
    Conducted by: Kenneth Kiesler
    Richard Troxell, tenor
    Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, organ
    Recording date: May-2001
    Produced by: Weir, Simon

  4. Ma tovu - 03:04
  5. Bar'khu - 01:21
  6. Sh'ma yisra'el - 01:39
  7. Mi khamokha - 02:08
  8. Kiddush - 04:07


    9. The Final Ingredient: Scenes 5, 9 and 10 (more info)
    Performed by: Michigan University Symphony Orchestra
    Composed by: David Amram
    Conducted by: Kenneth Kiesler
    Nicholas Phan, tenor
    Brian Pfaltzgraf, tenor
    Tyler Oliphant, baritone
    Pei Yi Wang, mezzo-soprano
    Thomas Glenn, tenor
    Sarah Elizabeth Williams, mezzo-soprano
    Mark Kent, bass
    Jesse Blumberg, baritone
    Deborah Selig, soprano
    Recording date: Dec-2000
    Produced by: Frost, David

  9. Scene 5 - 08:14
  10. Scene 9 - 01:59
  11. Scene 10 - 09:49

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Product Details
 
Composer(s)/ Author(s):
Amram, David

Conductor(s):
Kiesler, Kenneth; Wilkins, Christopher

Orchestra(s):
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra; Michigan University Symphony Orchestra

Artist(s):
Blumberg, Jesse; Bowers-Broadbent, Christopher; Glenn, Thomas; Kent, Mark; Oliphant, Tyler; Pfaltzgraf, Brian; Phan, Nicholas; Selig, Deborah; Troxell, Richard; Wang, Pei Yi; Williams, Sarah Elizabeth

Label: Naxos Milken Archives/American
UPC: 636943942024
Item Number: 8559420
Release Date: Jun 27, 2005

 
 
 
 
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