As cultural life has, to varying degrees, resumed in the past month or so, it makes perfect sense to roll out events that proffer quality works covering numerous artistic bases. That is the purview of the Cinematic Variations on Live Classical Music program, which is now taking place for the 30th time.
The series kicked off last month and will run through June, taking in a total of 15 multidisciplinary offerings, and will continue to offer some respite from the ongoing existential trials in the South and the North of the country.
In fact, the title is a little misleading. The presentation material references all kinds of sonic endeavors and other artistic activities, including jazz, dance, blues, and chanson-style music. Considering that the program’s artistic director Costel Safirman has worked closely with the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (JAMD) since the off, perhaps the multi-layered take on the arts is not at all surprising.
This Saturday’s slot is possibly the most local-centric of the lot, although the artist in question hailed from foreign cultural climes. It is fair to say that the Israeli jazz scene would not have reached the great heights it has achieved over the past 25 years if Arnie Lawrence had not made aliyah in the late 1990s with his wife, Lisa.
This was back when the Internet was still in its infancy, and portals to sonic and visual information such as YouTube were not even a twinkle in any web surfer’s eye. Lawrence came here from New York and fundamentally revolutionized the burgeoning Israeli jazz community. He was the real McCoy. He had served a long berth with modern jazz pioneer trumpeter and vocalist Dizzy Gillespie, and even mixed it with the great Louis Armstrong, one of the pillars of the art form since its earliest days.
Hagai Bilitzky certainly gets that. The fortysomething double bass player served a long apprenticeship with Lawrence, taking classes at the saxophonist’s International Center for Creative Music in leafy Ein Kerem, and providing the reedman with staunch rhythm support at numerous gigs in Israel, New York, and even at a club in Ramallah.
All of which makes Bilitzky the perfect choice to talk about Lawrence, as well as MCing a panel discussion about him and his contribution to Israeli jazz together with fellow former Lawrence alumni guitarist Hezi Chayat, pianist Alek Katz, drummer Yonatan Rosen, and saxophonist Jess Koren. They won’t just sit around extolling Lawrence’s virtues as a teacher and artist, they will also play a set of numbers that feed off the jazz annals, as well as the Great Israeli Songbook.
Lawrence, who died in 2005 at age 66, led a full life and left a rich legacy here that spread across the global jazz firmament. “Arnie really made it. Just look at all the students he brought up,” Bilitzky notes. “That’s what is important. That’s what he tried to do. He succeeded with that.”
The bassist says it is impossible to overestimate Lawrence’s role in developing Israeli jazz. “He pushed everything in the desired direction. He created a scene here. There were all sorts of venues he played jazz in – The Red House [in Moshav Beit Zayit], Beit Ha’Gefen in Haifa, in Ramallah, and Bethlehem – in places where he simply went and established the scene. None of that would have happened without Arnie.”
Combining films with lectures and/or concerts
ALL OF the Cinematic Variations on Live Classical Music events combine filmic content with a lecture and/or a concert or some other endeavor from a different complementary area of the arts.
As Safirman, who has headed the program since its inception in 1993, points out, the series anchor is visual. “We are a cinematheque, so I always start from the film. The subject matter can be wonderful, but if I don’t have access to a good documentary or feature movie, it won’t work for us.”
Eli Tal-El provides the big-screen component for the Lawrence slot with his documentary I Hear a Rainbow. The movie focuses more on the legendary teacher-saxophonist’s latter, less happy; days but Lawrence’s pioneering work here, which also included combining jazz with Arabic music, is front and center.
Safirman has laid on a feast of visual, sonic, and informative material for our entertainment and edification. The 2023-2024 season includes works about iconic French singer and actor Yves Montand; classical music documentary filmmaker Christopher Nupen, whose vast oeuvre includes We Want The Light about the close and challenging relationship between the Jews and German music; and an emotive film by Austrian cinematographer Christian Berger called Music under the Swastika: The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz, which focuses on now 98-year-old cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was a member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
Safirman says he is surprised and delighted that the series has gone on for so long. “I didn’t even think about the next one when we started in 1993,” he laughs. “I thought we’d do it once and see how it goes.”
The synergy with the JAMD was a solid point of artistic departure for the cinematic-based venture and continues to this day. “It started with Mendi Rodan. He was at the music academy,” the series perennial artistic director explains, noting that the late internationally renowned conductor who, like Safirman, was born in Romania.
The relationship between the Cinematheque and the JAMD has proven to be an enduringly fruitful arrangement. “I have been working with [JAMD productions director] Hana Englard for 30 years. It is incredible that we are still going,” says Safirman.
While Cinematic Variations on Live Classical Music is now a mainstay on the local cultural calendar, Safirman says he was relying on a limited catchment sector when the event started. “We didn’t know if anyone would be interested. But we got a lot of people from the environs of the Cinematheque, all sorts of olim [immigrants] from Britain and France who lived near Emek Refaim Street. We got large audiences, and then we started subscriptions and gradually built up.”
THAT MAY be also due to the range of genres, styles, and creative viewpoints Safirman et al manage to accommodate in the annual run-outs. Take, for example, the April 6 screening of André Previn: The Kindness of Strangers by British filmmaker Tony Palmer, whose genre-leaping nigh-on six-decade portfolio includes portraits of classical, rock, and pop music icons, as well as the world of ballet.
Previn was the quintessential musical polymath who excelled in jazz and movie music and as a classical conductor. The documentary follows Jewish-born Previn’s rise to success after he fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood and did the rounds of the world’s most glittering musical stages, centering on his operatic adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire and the behind-the-scenes work that went into it. The screening will be preceded by a talk by conductor Doron Salomon, and there will be renditions of classical and jazz works by mezzo-soprano Karin Shifrin accompanied by Tal Zilber on piano.
“The film about Previn is very interesting, and he is a very interesting person himself,” says Safirman. “There is also a documentary about [now 81-year-old Italian pianist] Maurizio Pollini,” he adds.
The latter offers a golden opportunity to learn about one of the classical world’s hidden gems. The series program notes spell it out. “There were a host of excellent reasons for making a film portrait of Maurizio Pollini: the greatness of the pianist, his extraordinary rarity – he is unknown and inaccessible and, apart from the odd concert and very rare interviews, little exists about him.” It appears that the documentarist, French filmmaker, writer, and violinist Bruno Monsaingeon, a contemporary of Pollini, grabbed the Italian at the perfect juncture, in 2014.
The program text references Pollini’s “desire he himself expressed to submit to the [documentary] exercise for the very first time. He was over 70 when the movie was made. He felt that it was time to allow himself to be filmed.” On April 13, “The Skill of Art” takes in a talk by JAMD professor, and pianist Ron Regev, as well as a recital of works by Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff.
Eclecticism has always been central to the programming ethos. “We have all sorts,” Safirman explains. “We have jazz and classical music, and we have had ethnic music, like Greek, in the past. This time we have a film about Pina Bausch.”
The January 13 date at the Cinematheque includes a screening of German media artist Lilo Mangelsdorff’s portrait of legendary compatriot modern dance innovator Bausch, Damen und Herren ab 65 (Ladies and Gentlemen over 65). The film follows the development and eventual execution of Bausch’s project, which involved a group of senior citizens, many of whom had never danced a step beforehand. The German-language, Hebrew-subtitled documentary is described as “a sensitive, humorous, and touching film that not only focuses on its protagonists in their capacity as ‘old dancers’ but also on their individuality, and in this way shows a lot of the spirit of Pina Bausch, without her being present herself,” Safirman says.
Veteran Israeli choreographer Galit Liss will set the scene with a preliminary talk, and the Goethe Institute-sponsored event closes with a performance by dancers from the Gila Workshops – Movement and Stage Art for Women of Mature Age. Sounds fascinating and could very well provide an eye-opener on ageism.
The energy levels ebb and flow across the series subject matter, and the dance dynamics segue into younger and faster-moving climes, with Queen and Béjart: Ballet for Life, made by former Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet company dancer Lynne Wake.
The film looks at a dance production created by French dancer-choreographer and opera director Maurice Béjart based on the life and work of legendary Queen rock band frontman Freddie Mercury and celebrated Argentinean ballet dancer Jorge Donn, both of whom died of AIDS in the early 1990s at the age of 45. JAMD dance teacher Shani Tamari-Matan will provide the theoretical and informative preliminaries with a six-member band performing some of Queen’s most popular numbers.
BACK TO the series’ official titular field of creative exploration, we get into some sumptuous classical music enterprise as we follow Dutch musician Janine Jansen making the most of a once-in-a-lifetime chance to try out on 12 of the world’s most prized Stradivarius violins.
In Falling for Stradivari, we follow Jansen making the most of her incredible window of opportunity alongside London’s Royal Opera House music director Sir Antonio Pappano. Together they embark on a voyage of discovery, probing the unique textures, colors, and sounds the prized instruments yield under Jansen’s practiced hands, and decide on the compositions that will do them justice. Ron Regev is once more pressed into service for the introductory talk, and later joins violinist Roy Shiloach in a rendering of César Franck’s Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano.
Elsewhere across the series, which runs until June, there are events devoted to the magic of blues harmonica player and singer James Cotton; legendary pianist-vocalist Nina Simone; 20th-century Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev; and French counterpart Camille Saint-Saens.
“We want to have the best at the Cinematheque,” says Safirman. “We have always aimed for the highest standards. It has to be interesting and good quality.”
Judging by the roll-out of his 30th Cinematic Variations on Live Classical Music, he is set to deliver the goods yet again. ❖
For tickets and more information: jer-cin.org.il/en/lobby/cinematic-variations-live-classical-music-20232024
