Petersburg School drew on materials rooted culturally and sociologically in the history of Jewish persecution over the centuries. They sought their source material in the secular tunes and religious melodies of the Pale of Settlement. Composers such as Aleksander Krein, Mikhail Gnessin, and Joel Engel applied techniques of Western classical music to cantorial and klezmer traditions to create a national Jewish style in art music. Dmitri Shostakovich created his intimately evocative song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry in 1948 but it was premiered only in 1955, due largely to Stalin’s disfavor for Shostakovich and to Soviet anti-Semitism in general.įor a brief period early in the 20th century, Czarist Russia was the center for Jewish art music composed in a style that became known as the St. We also heard acclaimed pianist Craig Sheppard in a piano trio by Mikhail Gnessin, dedicated “to the memory of our lost children”-written in 1943 as news of the Holocaust reached the Soviet Union. We revisited this story with Donald Byrd’s brilliant choreography for dancers from Spectrum Dance Theater. The play is a dramatically rich tale of a young woman who, on her wedding day, is possessed by the soul of the man who died of unrequited love for her. Joel Engel composed The Dybbuk Suite as incidental music for S. Our fall concert explored the complexity of Russian Jewish identity in the first half of the 20th century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |