By Eileen Wingard
SAN DIEGO — For three nights, during our visit to Israel last December, my daughter Harriet, son-in-law Danny and I were guests in the Kfar Saba duplex apartment of Er’ella and Yoav Talmi. Our friendship, dating back to Yoav’s years as Music Director of the San Diego Symphony, prompted the wonderful home hospitality.
Yoav, one of Israel’s foremost conductors and composers, was spending a few weeks at home, a bit of a respite from his heavy schedule as Music Director in Quebec City and world-wide guest conductor.
This will be Yoav’s twelfth and final season with the Quebec Symphony. His calendar of guest conducting stints during the coming months includes concerts with the Rochester Philharmonic in upstate New York, six concerts with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic and the Hungarian National Philharmonic.
While in Israel, Yoav, Professor of Conducting at the Buchmann-Mehta Music School at Tel Aviv University, taught his students. For our first morning in Kfar Saba, we rode with him to the campus where we visited the Eretz Yisrael Museum while he tutored his class. Then we met for lunch at the beautiful university.
Prior to our stay in Kfar Saba, we were in Haifa, where Yoav, who headed the jury, invited us to the Kreiger Center to hear the Aviv Competion for the conducting finalists. The Aviv competitions are sponsored by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. The three final competitors, two young men and one young woman, were all talented young professionals. They led the Haifa Symphony in works by Stravinsky, Schumann and Beethoven. However, the standards were steep and no one received the prize. One of the men was selected for honorable mention.
Every morning, the maestro was awake by 5:00 a.m. working in his studio. He had just finished composing a piece for choir and orchestra, “De Profundis,” to be sung in Hebrew, Latin, French and English. The work is based on a few Psalms, including the Psalm which begins,”MiMa’amakim” (From the depths), and on two Hebrew poems written by the famous Israeli poets Lea Goldberg and Rachel Bluwstein. Yoav was copying out the parts, a painstakingly arduous task. Rather than use a computer program, he was doing it by hand. The manuscript was neat and legible. He obviously had inherited his father’s artistic skills. This work will be premiered next May at the final concert of Yoav’s tenure with the Quebec Symphony and a year later with the Jerusalem Symphony.
In the afternoon of the first day, we drove with the Talmis to Zichron Yaakov to visit their daughter Dana, her husband Miguel, and their two children, Yahli and Yoni. I saw a different side of Yoav. He was on the floor, playing with his grandchildren. He swung five year old Yahli, still dressed in her tutu, fresh from her dance lesson, built blocks with three year old Yoni, and thoroughly enjoyed interacting with the two charming youngsters. Yoav looked relaxed and content. “My grandpa is funny!” quipped Yahli, her happy smile lighting up her dark blue eyes.
Er’ella does not travel as frequently abroad with Yoav so that she can be with her grandchildren several times a week. Although Er’ella, a renowned professional flutist, has given up her performance career, she has turned to a new vocation, authoring children’s books. Yoav’s energetic wife has finished writing an eleven-set series with the first two already published. Each cleverly illustrated book tells an imaginative tale about a child and a musical instrument, some even have more than one of each, and is written in verse. The first was about a little boy named Gil and his flute (Gil is the name of the Talmi’s son). The second book is about a youngster named Yonatan, or Yoni, and his trumpet (Yoni is the nickname of the Talmi’s grandson, Yonatan).
Er’ella is also the chairman of the Board of Directors for the Israel Chamber Orchestra (ICO). The board chair is currently trying to fund raise to support the ICO’ playing a concert for the children who live at the foothills of Mount Carmel which was badly damaged during the great fire last December.
With the Talmis, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Daughter Dana is the founder and director of a project called Yahel, Social Change Program which brings young college graduates from abroad to Israel for five months to work with communities, such as the Ethiopian Jewish Community, to help create centers for teenagers and assist with other projects to improve the lives of those communities. Son-in-law Miguel, a PHD in Environmental Studies, is involved in a commercial solar energy company. Son Gil, who lives in New York, writes musical scores for films and devotes much of his time to documentaries on social justice issues. Several of the documentaries have won awards.
What an inspiration for my children and me to be with people who are making a difference in the world through music, through social justice, through the environment, through being warm and loving friends! Our visit to Israel was greatly enriched by our stay with the Talmis.
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Wingard is a freelance writer and a former violinist with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra .