Swiss-born American conductor Leon Botstein has released a new album – Exodus – that highlights the underappreciated contribution of three Jewish immigrants whose lives were irrevocably altered by the rise of Nazism: Walter Kaufman, who fled Czechoslovakia for India; Marcel Rubin, who emigrated from Austria to Mexico; and Josef Tal, who left Berlin for Palestine in 1935.
The music, the second in a series, was recorded with The Orchestra Now (TON), a graduate program in Bard College in New York, for the training of the next generation of professional musicians, founded by the conductor in 2015.
“Of the three composers on this CD, Tal was the only to develop a career as a professional composer,” Botstein, who also serves as president of Bard, said in a conversation with The Jerusalem Post.
In Palestine, and later in Israel, Tal emerged as a pivotal figure in modern music, gaining international acclaim. But his perspective on Israeli music was unusual for his time, since he did not align himself with the national ideology calling upon composers to weave their compositions with “Jewish” and Israeli elements. This however does not mean that Tal eschewed his Jewish heritage, which was instead filtered through his own artistic lens.
“He was thoroughly committed to form a universal language, one that transcends the differences of national ethnic identity, transforming the local into the universal,” Botstein said.
In 1946, Tal completed his Exodus for baritone solo and orchestra, one of his more important works and which is premiered on the new album.
First performed in 1947
Exodus was first performed by the Palestine Symphony Orchestra on December 12, 1947, in the first days of Israel’s War of Independence. Commissioned by choreographer Debora Bertonov, it was originally conceived as ballet music for piano, narrator, and percussion. Tal later elaborated on this composition bringing it to its present form as a cantata-Oratorio constructed on the biblical narrative.
Botstein emphasized the resonance of the Exodus for Tal and his generation, viewing it as a metaphor for exile, dispersion, and the yearning for a homeland. One of the major focal points in this composition is the mutuality of dialect between the biblical text and the music.
“Language affects the rhythmic and pitch ideas of the piece,” he said. “Tal translated the Hebrew language to music and sound, much like Martin Buber and Franz Rozenzweig’s did in their translation of the bible to archaic German.”
Throughout, Tal’s music harnesses itself to convey the biblical narrative – from the 1st movement with its slow march rhythms describing the toiling Israelites under the yoke of the Egyptians to the 3rd movement when the same march rhythms become hasty and abrupt in their depiction of the Exodus.
The “Dance of Miriam” is the concluding section, perhaps the most interesting in the piece, where we see Tal’s individuality in resounding tropes of ancient Jewish and Israeli music (real or imagined), with long and dance-like syncopated passages for the harp, the tambourine and English horn.
The other works on the record, by Kaufman and Rubin, are also fascinating compositions: Kaufman’s Indian Symphony is a highly rhythmical piece; he researched folk music and integrated some Indian music in the last movement. In contrast, Rubin’s Symphony No. 4 is considerably more introverted, cynically dwelling on the demise of Nazi Germany with variations on the Dies Irae theme.
The performance by TON is razor sharp. The three composers on this CD, as described by Jehuash Hirshberg, a professor of musicology at Hebrew University music, embody an “individual nationalism” approach to music.
Despite their forced emigration, their compositions remain rooted in Western musical traditions, offering distinct perspectives shaped by their personal experiences. It leaves the listener to consider the broader context of Tal’s contribution alongside other emigrant Israeli composers of the same era.