Monday, June 25, 2007

Israeli music

The past two evenings we were lucky to experience performances of Israeli music of two quite different kinds.
On Saturday night we went to the last of the series of concerts of the Herzliya Chamber Orchestra held at the ultra-modern auditorium in Herzliya. Only in the last concert they usually have a different kind of show, not necessarily classical music. This time they had a quartet of women named "Eve's Women" playing Klezmer music, but in a jazzed up style. The musicians were excellent, especially the clarinettist (needed for Klezmer) and the drummer. However, while she was excellent, she was also very loud and that tended to spoil the performance for several people. It was like being at a wedding more than a concert.
On Sunday night we went by bus with a group of people to the Casa Shalom at Gan Yavne near Ashdod. This was a fund raiser for their work to research and help cryto-Jews ("marranos" or anusim in Hebrew). The music was Sephardic, sung mostly in Ladino by a soloist Betty Klein, who accompanied herself on the guitar and oud. She sang songs from Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Turkey and elewhere. Wherever Sephardic Jews settled they brought their music, and it often intermingled with the local varieties. In some cases the same song can be sung with different lyrics in Ladino, Yiddish and Hebrew. Meanwhile we enjoyed a nice meal sitting in a garden in perfect weather.
One interesting thing I learnt there is that many French and other Jews evaded the Holocaust by escaping to Spain. That doesn't make sense since Franco Spain was Fascist and allied with Germany. However, it seems that many crypto-Jews in Spain sympathized with and helped the Jewish refugees. I won't bother you with details of the work of Casa Shalom, but you can visit their web-site at www.casa-shalom.com .

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