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Cantorial Music
Kamti Lehallel (I Rise in Praise): The Musical Tradition of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Communities of Amsterdam, London and New York Beth Hatefutsoth Amazon price $27.99 Kamti Lehallel (I Rise in Praise) is a lavish, 2 CD set presenting the Spanish and Portuguese cantorial tradition, one of the best preserved musical traditions of the Jewish diaspora, but also one of the most obscure. The set contains 50 cantorial works representing centuries of tradition, sung by Cantor Daniel Halfon of the Yad Harav Nissim synagogue in Jerusalem, accompanied by the Or Hadash Choir and a small chamber orchestra conducted by Azi Schwartz. After the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain (and a few year later, Portugal), some Jews chose to stay and convert to Christianity, while attempting to maintain some Jewish traditions. As the Inquisition intensified in the 1500's, many descendants of these conversos fled to northern Europe, where they were free to re-establish the practice of their ancestral religion. In communities in Amsterdam, London and later in far-flung locations such as New York, Suriname and Gibraltar, a rich choral tradition developed for synagogue services that drew heavily from the western classical canon. Halfon's powerful baritone is in fine form on this crystal clear recording, and the delicate vocal harmonies and instrumental accompaniment result in a rich, vivid auditory experience. Many of the pieces do resemble each other, so it might be a bit much to listen to the whole set in one sitting, despite the essential beauty of the material. Particularly exquisite and interesting are the various renditions of the kaddish, especially the example from the Rosh Hashanna liturgy, a haunting and well-known melody. Some listeners will certainly be surprised by Kamti Lehallel, as the collection superficially sounds just like western choral music, even given the great care taken in proper, Sephardic pronunciation of the Hebrew. One of the big influences on this genre was 18th century Spanish opera styles, and this comes through as well. But this kind of borrowing is also a tradition - musically, Jewish communities have always absorbed the conventions of the surrounding, larger culture while maintaining the set order of prayer and the use of Hebrew. The piyutim and prayers of the Jews of Arab lands use the same complicated scale system found in Arabic classical and popular music, while in America countless psalms and prayers have been set to music that is basically folk or rock. The production quality on Kamti Lehallel is top-notch in all areas. The discs come with an illustrated CD sized hardbound book that features extensive liner and production notes in Hebrew and English. Each track is presented with the Hebrew text (along with an English translation) and an explanation of its history and usage in Hebrew and English. This recording is a must for lovers of chazzanut and choral music and will be of great interest to anyone interested in the diversity of the Jewish musical experience.
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When my wife and I briefly moved to
Portland, Ore., a decade ago, one of the first things we did was shop
around for a synagogue. Despite our Ashkenazic roots, we eventually
settled on Ahavath Achim, a Sephardic congregation that offered a perfect
trifecta of friendly people, good food and beautiful music. The melodies
used during services were a special treat; they were gorgeous, and quite
different from the Ashkenazic songs I grew up with. The same applies to the material on “Kamti Lehallel(I Rise in Praise): The Musical Tradition of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Communities of Amsterdam, London and New York.” Co-produced by Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum and Beth Hatefutsoth (aka the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, in Tel Aviv), this two-CD set presents the central repertoire of three of the most important Sephardic communities in the Western hemisphere. British cantor Daniel Halfon, who has sung for Sephardic congregations in all three cities — including New York’s Shearith Israel, where he was an assistant cantor for a time — labored for nearly 10 years to assemble the collection, and not a moment appears to have been wasted. Bound in hardcover like a tiny book, the set contains a series of remarkably informative track annotations and liner-note essays in both English and Hebrew. And the music, which includes songs associated with the Sabbath and all the major festivals, will be a revelation to anyone who is not already familiar with the Sephardic tradition. It might be a revelation even if you go to a Sephardic synagogue every week. As emigration from Mizrahi communities has transformed the demographics of Sephardic congregations across North America, the old Western diasporic repertoire has been supplanted to some extent by music from North Africa and the Middle East. “The Spanish and Portuguese tradition has much in common with many communities in Northern Morocco,” Halfon wrote in an e-mail interview with the Forward. Yet, aside from some striking similarities in the repertoire for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, “there is almost no point of musical contact” between the Spanish and Portuguese communities and their Mizrahi counterparts. By contrast, the musical and cultural relationships among the Sephardic communities of Amsterdam, London and New York are uniformly rich and deep. The Brazilian Jews who founded Shearith Israel in New Amsterdam (later known as New York City) had originally traveled to Recife from old Amsterdam, while Portuguese Dutch rabbi Menasseh ben Israel played a leading role in persuading Oliver Cromwell to allow the Jews to return to England after 350 years of exile. As early as the 17th and 18th centuries, religious leaders traveled freely among the three communities, carrying their sacred music with them to New York and back again from Amsterdam and London. These Sephardim were descended from Spanish and Portuguese conversos who had converted to Christianity during the Inquisition. Having lost the liturgical music of their forebears, they naturally tried to replace it. What they came up with was a novel combination of old Jewish music from the Eastern Mediterranean and new Western choral and instrumental works by Jewish and non-Jewish composers. The Amsterdam, London and New York communities also developed their own unique choral styles. “London has retained a very Anglican style of choral performance,” Halfon said. “The choir is there to lead the congregation in song.” In New York, the choir “is essentially an opera chorus which performs for a largely passive congregation.” Meanwhile, the Dutch acquired a bent for energetic and idiosyncratic communal singing. “Unusual intervals suddenly appear in certain pieces,” Halfon said, “with tones sharpened or flattened where one might not expect them to be.” In order to present a coherent gloss of all three traditions and avoid replicating material that had already been recorded, Halfon commissioned Raymond Goldstein, arranger/composer and associate conductor of the Jerusalem Great Synagogue Choir, to write fresh arrangements for every piece in the collection. And that leads us to one of the most remarkable things about “Kamti Lehallel”: While the settings are all new, they sound old — and I mean that as a compliment. Pieces dating from the 17th or 18th century receive flawless Baroque or early classical treatment, while melodies by such 19th-century composers as Benjamin Artom and Samuel de Sola get the classical-to-Romantic touch. As an added bonus, Halfon and Goldstein revive the practice of including instrumental accompaniment for many pieces. (The Western Sephardic tradition originally made room for both voices and instruments, but gradually became exclusively a cappella.) For Halfon, “Kamti Lehallel” was both a labor of love and a means of bringing this music to a wider audience. “The project itself resulted from a visit I paid to Beth Hatefutsoth almost 10 years ago to meet an old friend, Joel Cahen, the museum’s chief curator,” he said. “I saw for sale in the museum’s shop recordings representing a number of liturgical traditions, and suggested to Joel (a Dutchman and familiar with the Spanish and Portuguese tradition) that maybe there was a gap in the catalog.” Consider it filled. Alexander Gelfand is a writer living in New York City. | |||||||||
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Saved From extinction
Thanks to the efforts of Cantor Daniel Halfon,
the rich musical tradition of Portugal's Marrano communities has been
recorded on a best selling CD 13 March
2008 By Ben Shalev When Cantor Daniel Halfon was a boy in late-1950s
London, his father took him to a different synagogue every Shabbat.
Halfon's father liked to listen to the different styles of the services
and wanted his son to be aware of this rich diversity. But one Saturday,
Halfon asked his father to take him back to the synagogue they had visited
the week before, of the Portuguese community. "The singing I heard somehow
resonated inside me. I felt as if this was my place," Halfon recalled. He
was just 4 at the time.
Almost 50 years later, Halfon is the most important, if not the only, keeper of the flame of the liturgical music of the Portuguese communities, which were established in the 17th century in Amsterdam, New York and London by Marranos who fled the Iberian Peninsula for fear of a second Inquisition and returned to the fold of Judaism. Contrary to other styles, in which both young and old are fluent, the Portuguese ritual is threatened by extinction: It is being preserved mostly by the elderly and may disappear entirely with their death. It is difficult to stop this natural process, but recently those seeking to maintain this tradition were given an aid to help them in their struggle: "Kamti Lehallel" ("I Rise in Praise"), a CD set documenting the Spanish and Portuguese musical traditions, issued by the Feher Jewish Music Center at Beth Hatefutsoth, the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv, and featuring Halfon. "I wanted to do something before it was too late," Halfon says, "and my goal is for the members of the congregations to hear the discs, and say 'Wow, that's ours?' So we have something that's worth preserving." Why is the Portuguese liturgy gradually disappearing? "Every community has its story," Halfon explains. "The Amsterdam community was for the most part decimated during the Holocaust, and most of its members today are people who came from Israel and brought their customs with them. In London, the customs were kept up through the 1970s thanks to Cantor Eliezer Avinon, but now the traditional liturgy is in danger of being supplanted over time by the one the Iraqi Jewish immigrants brought with them. An alarming indicator of the possibilty of this change is what has happened with 'Et Sha'arei Ratzon,' a central piyut sung on Rosh Hashana. Musically speaking, a Rosh Hashana without its being sung is not a Rosh Hashana . During one of my recent visits, I found that they now sing at least part of it in the Iraqi style, and as far as I'm concerned that's not a good sign. "In New York, the situation is better," he continues, "but because most of the community's members are Ashkenazim, they may like to hear the Portuguese style, but they find it difficult to participate." And what is happening in Israel? Members of the Portuguese congregations immigrated to Israel in relatively small numbers; not one local synagogue uses Portuguese liturgy, although a small congregation meets once a month in Jerusalem's Old City . Halfon himself is the cantor at a Jerusalem synagogue most of whose congregants come from Iraq and North Africa. Halfon began his supplemental studies of Portuguese liturgy at the age of 11, studying with Eliezer Avinon: "I came to him every week with a tape recorder and he would sing, tell stories, show me how to function as a cantor. Afterward, at home, I would listen to the recordings and practice." In the late 1970s, Halfon was invited to be the second cantor of New York's Spanish-Portuguese synagogue. Here, the senior cantor, Rabbi Abraham Lopez Cardoso, taught him the liturgy used in Amsterdam while another, elderly rabbi taught him about the nuances of the liturgy used by Portuguese-Jewish congregations in Gibraltar. According to Yuval Shaked, director of the Diaspora Museum's Center for the Study of Jewish Music, who will be leaving his post at the end of the month: "Daniel's knowledge of all the variants of Portuguese liturgy is phenomenal. Usually, you encounter people who are very well versed in what they grew up with. Daniel can start singing and then [suddenly] stop and say: In London they sing it this way, in Amsterdam they do it a little differently, and in Gibraltar there is a third version. He has the senses of a researcher." The idea of recording a disc documenting the musical traditions of the Portuguese community surfaced around 10 years ago. Halfon didn't have to try very hard to convince the Center for Jewish Music's previous director, Avner Bahat, and its current director, Shaked, of the project's importance. The Portuguese liturgy has some unique characteristics: It combines influences from North Africa and Western Europe, and blends liturgical music with classical Baroque-era music. 'Created from scratch' "This music is fascinating, because it's a tradition that was almost created from scratch," says Shaked. "After 100 years as Catholics, the Marranos did not recognize the Jewish customs. They wanted to connect to Judaism, as we would say today, but they didn't know how. So they invited hakhamim [rabbis] from North Africa and Salonika, who taught them how to sing and pray. In the older tunes one really can discern the Andalusian roots, but as time passed, the influence of classical Western music increasingly began to seep in. Tunes in minor keys switched to major keys, and quarter tones disappeared. "In addition to their historical importance, these are beautiful melodies," he adds. "But even during the project's early stages we realized that melodies are not enough to make a disc. True, in the synagogue they sang a cappella, but that doesn't mean that we, too, are limited to a cappella. We wanted to present the tradition in a modern way, to make it resonate as richly and vibrantly as possible." Thus arranger-composer Raymond Goldstein wrote fresh arrangements for the collection's pieces, and the recordings feature a six-man choir as well as an ensemble of 10 musicians, conducted by Azi Schwartz. "In the end it has to be an attractive product and one that can compete with Deutsche Grammophon," explains Shaked. The double CD album, released some months ago, has so far sold over 1,500 copies, and it is the best-selling album in the catalog of the Diaspora Museum's Center for the Study of Jewish Music. Halfon hopes the second edition will be released soon. He is currently looking into organizing a concert in which some of the works included on the disc will be performed. But sales are not the only measure of success for Halfon: "After Yom Kippur I received e-mails from people in Amsterdam who wrote, 'We listened to the discs before the holiday and it created the atmosphere for us.' When I read that, I felt I had succeeded." | |||||||||
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Italicised phrases represent revisions to the original article. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/963236.html | |||||||||
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February/March 2008 Volume XXVII, No.3 Association of Jewish Libraries N E W S L E T T E R
Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Communities of Amsterdam, London and New York. Tel Aviv: Beth Hatefutsoth Records, 2007.2 compact discs. $25.00 BTR 0701. Listeners could not be faulted for mistaking this 19th-and 20th-century synagogue music for 18th-century Catholic or Lutheran church music. As Spanish and Portuguese conversos returned to Judaism and settled in Amsterdam, they rebuilt hazzanut practically from scratch, developing a new liturgical tradition that relied heavily on the music of the Italian Baroque. The music on these discs was meticulously researched and arranged for chorus and instrumental ensemble by Hazzan Daniel Halfon and composer Raymond Goldstein. The discs are accompanied by a lavishly illustrated hardcover booklet, over100 pages, containing detailed program notes and essays on the communities and musical traditions represented, complete with generous bibliographies. Even if these recordings were of mediocre quality, they would be extremely valuable for musicological research alone. Thankfully, this is far from the case. The performances and recording quality are nothing short of exquisite. The arrangements are beautiful; (one can occasionally detect harmonies that are not stylistically appropriate, but if one is not too particular about historical accuracy, these moments give the music some welcomed harmonic variety.) It goes without saying that institutions with programs in Jewish music or ethno-musicology should purchase this set, but any library with a sound recording collection would find Kamti Lehallel to be a valuable academic resourceas well as a collection of beautiful music. Daniel Scheide, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL | |||||||||
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