By David Amos
SAN DIEGO– The motto of San Diego Jewish World, “there is a Jewish story everywhere,” came to life last weekend when my wife and I visited Texas for four days.
The main reason for the trip was to attend the Bar-Mitzvah of the son of my cousin. They live in Austin, and the services took place at a conservative synagogue, Agudas Achim. The service was beautifully done, and the Bar-Mitzvah boy was very well prepared, His speech to the congregation was unusually entertaining, informative, and presented with eloquence, humor, and drama, making it one of the best of its kind that we have ever heard.
The small, but delightful Texas surprise was the chanting of the concluding hymn, familiar to us as Adon Olam. But I bet that most people have never heard it sung to the tune of Deep in the Heart of Texas! Hand claps and all.
We first flew to Houston, where the recently retired concertmaster of the Houston Symphony is living. He brilliantly served in that position for 18 years. Previous to Houston, he was co-concertmaster of the Israel Philharmonic for at least 20 years, and played in that great orchestra for many more. Israeli born and trained, Uri Pianka has a distinguished career that few violinists rival in the world. If you ever saw the Israel Philharmonic on tour in the U.S. in the last 40 years, Pianka was for certain playing in the first stand of violins, many times as concertmaster.
I met Uri Pianka in the 1980’s when I conducted a series of recordings with the Israel Philharmonic. Since then, I have followed his career, recalling our encounters in the 80’s. Three years ago, he was the guest soloist (Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto) in two concerts we played with San Diego’s Tifereth Israel Community Orchestra.
During the 80’s recordings in Tel-Aviv, another member of the Philharmonic told me. “You are getting Pianka and (Chaim) Taub as concertmasters; you simply can’t get better than that!”
It was only logical that on our way to Austin, we made a short detour to Houston to have lunch with Uri and his wife Sara. We caught up with each other’s lives and family, and at their home were treated to a remarkable collection of photographs of Uri, together with practically every musical celebrity you can name, during their visits to Israel to play with the Philharmonic. A most impressive collection of historical photos.
My third immersion into things Jewish was the book I took along on this quick trip, the recently published book Dinner with Lenny, by Jonathan Cott. A quick read, this is the transcript of the last long interview that Leonard Bernstein gave one year before he died.
There have been many books written about Bernstein, whose life has been called “the most spectacular career in the history of music” Some books are factual, others academic, and some even scandalous, although all of them fascinating. Cott’s 12 hour interview resulted in a book where Bernstein talked frankly about himself, not only on his musical life, but on his many other interests and passions, including family, teaching, Israel, Judaism, politics, and human rights.
Whenever I read a book, I bracket in pencil any names, sentences or concepts that are worthy of re-visiting and quoting. During this reading, my pencil was in constant demand. Here are a few comments worth repeating to you:
“ I realized many years later that the “gang call” –the way the Jets signal to each other—in West Side Story was really like the call of the Shofar (sings: ba-dahhh dum! Be dee um!) that I used to hear blown in temple on Rosh Hashanah”.
“We always try to have our family seders with a minimum of mumbling and a maximum of explanations, and an encouraging of many more than four questions. And then the adults begin to dicker and disagree like rabbis. Sometimes seders result in great dancing and singing, and other times they break out into terrible fights. ‘Well, that’s impossible! That explanation can’t be true, the Haggadah is wrong’ As they say, a camel is a horse made by a committee—by a Jewish committee”.
In response to a statement made by the Hassidic Rabbi Dov Baer, which states that Each person consists of a certain song of existence, the one by which our innermost being was created and is defined, Bernstein commented “That’s beautiful. And that’s a very fancy way of saying what I’m trying to say, which is very simple…though the work to be done is very complicated. Because we destroy our children’s songs of existence by giving them inhibitions, teaching them to be cynical, manipulative and all the rest of it, and this is in addition to the usual childhood traumas—as I spoke about before—which is all part of child abuse which takes many forms: lack of attention, lack of love”.
“I don’t want to spend my life as Toscanini did, studying and re-studying the same fifty pieces of music. It would bore me to death. I want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to keep trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can do justice to them all”.
On teaching conducting students:” I just advise students to look at the score and make it come alive as if they were the composer. If you can do that, you’re a conductor, and if you can’t, you’re not”.
Also on conducting: “Even the purely mechanical matter of beating time, of conducting four beats in a bar, should be an emotional experience instead of a mathematical one”.
There are also other insights into Maimonides, anti-Semitism in the Vienna Philharmonic, the conversions of Mahler and Schoenberg, his teaching music as a rabbi teaches his congregation, Glenn Gould, other fellow conductors, and much, much more.
*
Amos is conductor of the Tifereth Israel Community Orchestra and has guest conducted professional orchestras around the world. He may be contacted at david.amos@sdjewishworld.com