00:02We're taking a break in the auditorium and here in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art we're going to have
00:08a discussion moderated by composer, arranger and conductor, Professor Michael Volpe.
00:21Hello everybody, we are in the Tel Aviv Museum in the Dina and Rafael Recanati galleries in the Hertha and
00:29Paul Amir building and I'm very happy to be here for a conversation, a very interesting conversation together with a
00:39pianist Renana Gutmann, the pianist and the pedagogue Michael Tal and the musicologist and the conductor.
00:46Welcome. In this competition we have quite a lot of pieces written during the first half of the 20th century
01:00by composers like Henrietta Bosman, Pavel Haas, Misha Hillesum, Erwin Shuloff, Leo Smith, Victor Ullmann and Franz Weiss who all
01:13of them unfortunately died during the
01:16Holocaust. Renana, what about you? How did you find yourself connected to this kind of music and what other composers
01:25that you have played from this list?
01:29Actually, it was a gradual process. I was first exposed to some of this music or heard performances of Shulhoff
01:39and Klein abroad in different places in Europe mostly, hardly in the States.
01:46And then I formed a music series of both chamber music by some of these composers on the list and
01:56some of them just solo recitals.
02:01So Weinberg, Weinberg, Ullmann, Haas but it was the vocal music of Haas, chamber music of Weinberg, piano sonata of
02:11Ullmann and many other composers, not many but several other significant composers.
02:16composers who wrote only one piece.
02:19You know that Pavel Haas is the only composer that one of his pieces was recorded during the Holocaust in
02:26Theresienstadt ghetto and we have today this amazing film from the propaganda film in which we can hear is a
02:34tute for string played in Theresienstadt by the Theresienstadt orchestra.
02:40Only two months before he was deported. It was from the Nazi propaganda movie. Yes. So I started becoming a
02:50little bit more curious and I went to Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem to find some more obscure scores
02:58perhaps of composers who did not even make it to the Rubinstein list.
03:04Even though I love this list. It's absolutely wonderful. So it has been an ongoing project in the last few
03:11years. I would say by now it's about a decade of trying to find more pieces and also commissioning new
03:17pieces.
03:17So when you find a piece written by somebody who died in the composer who died in the Holocaust, what
03:24will be the reasons for you to play it?
03:28Exactly.
03:29I mean if the quality is not well, will you play it for the memory of this artist or you
03:36will neglected it?
03:38Yeah. Excellent questions and actually perhaps I should start with Shulhoff because he's the composer like Michal that I played
03:45the most of. I played many piano suites and gave them to my students.
03:50His music in comparison let's say with the Gideon Klein Sonata for me doesn't encapsulate or it's not in service
03:58of capturing the reality of the moment.
04:01But it gives me an idea of the kind of colorful artistic life that he was having, the full life
04:08like Michal was saying. I know he loved dancing tango.
04:12And it made me think and wish that these composers would not be defined based on their experience in the
04:19Holocaust. But I try to picture what kind of life did they have?
04:24Were they exposed to dance clubs in Prague and dance tango? Were they exposed like Mahler let's say to marching
04:31bands in the street? What kind of cultural life did they have?
04:35What were they exposed to culturally and of course historically? And so I wanted to give breath that their lives
04:44were much beyond just the definition of being Jewish and how it wrote the rest of their history.
04:53So that was the first thing to give a colorful picture of the range of life experiences they had that
05:01was not defined necessarily by their Jewish identity.
05:05And the other thing was that I feel there are so many missing pieces of history that we can never
05:12get back anyway.
05:15And even with, let's say, both months that I've never heard her pieces performed, I feel like I would love
05:23to know what representatives were from the Jewish musicians or cultural life in Holland at the time during those years.
05:32How were they integrated into the society, let's say, or Ilse Weber, yeah, people like that.
05:38I have to admit that I don't find any Jewish influence in all those Dutch composers that died in the
05:47Holocaust.
05:47I feel that they were really part of the establishment and the international style that was in those days in
05:57Holland.
05:57Yeah, I completely agree.
05:58From this point of view they are very different from the other composers.
06:02And another thing that I have to, when I compare Schulhof to Ullmann, for example, we have to remember that
06:08half of, almost half of the compositions by Victor Ullmann were written in ghetto Theresienstadt.
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