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Concert Roundup
CLARINETIST Giora Feidman is no ordinary musician. He is a genuine and immensely devoted proponent of Jewishness as expressed in the so-called klezmer music of Eastern-European Jewry.
Klezmer music, as a natural, living phenomenon, a folkloristic art of bitter sweetness and tragedy permeated by laughter and piety, has ceased to exist.
Recently, however, there has been a revival of klezmer music in the form of pop and rock. These interpretations vandalize the music and shamelessly exploit people's insatiable appetite for cheap and banal entertainment.
For Feidman, klezmer music means a thousand things more. For him it is a beautiful expression of his personality and a profound identification with an idiom which developed over hundreds of years and which became an integral part of Jewish existence.
Feidman's klezmer music lifts one up to a spiritual level, to prayer-like meditation and to an individuation which brings the believer closer to his creator.
Feidman played Ernst Bloch's famous Schelomo rhapsody for cello and orchestra, adapted for the clarinet; Three Points of Light, a suite by Ora Bat-Haim,...