Bloch, E: From Jewish Life

A dazzling orchestral disc of music from the Jewish tradition of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Bruch’s Kol Nidrei is one of the most well-loved works in the cello repertoire. The descending opening phrase of the cello line is instantly recognizable: a universal, extraordinarily expressive utterance.

The main part of the disc comprises the works for cello and orchestra by Ernest Bloch, all part of his ‘Jewish cycle’. The most famous is Schelomo, a work inspired by passages from Ecclesiastes, where the cello, playing a deeply lyric and speaking line of prodigious technical difficulty, can be seen as ‘the incarnation of King Solomon’, as Bloch himself wrote. The other large-scale work for cello and orchestra, Voice in the Wilderness, is of a darker hue. Both works reveal a composer whose works should be firmly in the canon of twentieth-century symphonic writing.

The cellist here is Natalie Clein, a celebrated figure in British musical life since winning BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1995 and now a formidable artist, possessed of great musical, technical and intellectual gifts.

Shostakovich’s sonata is the final work of a mortally ill composer, full of enigmatic hints, echoes and reminiscences. In contrast, Bloch’s compositions are examples of self-confident national art with a predilection for a meditative underlying mood.

Born into a Jewish family from Eastern Europe in 1960 in La Plata, Argentina, Osvaldo Golijov had his whole childhood and musical education steeped in Judaic liturgies and klezmer and traditional music.

Some eight hundred years ago, Isaac the Blind – who was the greatest Cabalist rabbi of Provence – dictated a manuscript in which he declared that everything in the universe, each thing and each event, was the product of combinations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Inspired by this text, this quintet for clarinet and string quartet was first performed in 1994 by the great klezmer clarinetist Giora Feidman.

The three pieces making up From Jewish Life were composed in 1924 by Ernest Bloch for Hans Kindler, solo cello of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, who had given the first performance of the famous 'Hebrew rhapsody' Schelomo for cello and orchestra. Abodah, the arrangement of a Yom Kippur melody, premiered in 1929 by the young Yehudi Menuhin, was composed from one of the sketches made by Bloch for his opera on Jezebel.

These two works clearly illustrate this quotation by Ernest Bloch: 'There will be Jewish rhapsodies for orchestra, Jewish poems, especially dramas; poems for voice of which I don't have the lyric, but which I would want in Hebrew.

Steven Isserlis has earned a reputation as one of the foremost cellists of our day. At the same time he has become known for his ingenuity and innovation in programming, something which this disc is the perfect example of. It combines four works for cello and orchestra all arranged at his personal request, and each of them by the arranger of his choice.

The most radical reworking is the opening piece, an arrangement based on the fact that Debussy at the age of 19 composed a Suite for cello and orchestra. All that is known for certain about this suite is that its fourth movement was called Intermezzo, and that this piece has survived in a version for cello and piano. In her imaginative reconstruction of – or rather replacement for – Debussy’s original composition, Sally Beamish has used this piece as the opening movement, going on to construct orchestral arrangements of four other Debussy works from the same period, including the piano pieces Rêverie and Danse bohémienne. The two Ravel songs which follow were arranged by Isserlis’ friend, the violinist Richard Tognetti, in order to supplement the concert programme for a tour that the two were to make with Tognetti’s own Australian Chamber Orchestra. Vladimir Blok’s orchestration of Prokofiev’s Concertino, which had been left incomplete at the death of the composer, was made as Isserlis was unhappy with the existing arrangement of the work, made by Kabalevsky. The disc closes with the earliest of these four re-visions, film composer Christopher Palmer’s orchestration of Ernest Bloch’s From Jewish Life. Throughout the programme Isserlis receives the expert support of Tapiola Sinfonietta and Gábor Takács-Nagy.

Violinist, pianist, conductor, composer, Ernest Bloch, had to live between two worlds: his native Europe, torn by wars and anti-Semitism, and the American mirage offering successes as glorious as they were short-lived. Voice in the Wilderness, written 20 years after the famous Schelomo, remains little known. This masterpiece exists in two versions: a dialogue between piano and cello, and a rhapsody in which the piano gives way to a large orchestra. In the first recording since 1952, Voice in the Wilderness is again heard in its original version along with its vibrant summary, Visions and Prophecies.