United States Prokofiev, Ben-Haim, Tchaikovsky: Pinchas Zukerman (violin), Israel Philharmonic Orchestra / Lahav Shani (conductor). Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Corridor, New York, 15.10.2025. (ES-S)
Prokofiev – Overture on Hebrew Themes
Ben-Haim – Violin Concerto; ‘Berceuse sfaradite’ (encore)
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No.4; ‘Russian Dance’ from The Nutcracker (encore)
Returning to Carnegie Corridor for a multi-performance collection after an eight-year hiatus, the Israel Philharmonic, underneath its younger music director Lahav Shani, introduced New York audiences with packages pairing Tchaikovsky’s final three symphonies with orchestral works by the Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim.
The primary of those live shows, that includes Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, Ben-Haim’s Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, traced an intricate cultural map triangulated between Russian Romanticism, Central-European late-Romantic custom and Jewish folklore. What emerged was much less a distinction of idioms than a dialogue throughout generations, revealing how widespread melodic and emotional archetypes persist at the same time as they migrate by means of time and geography.
Ben-Haim’s Violin Concerto (1947, rev.1960) ought to have shaped this system’s emotional and cultural axis. Its inclusion was not solely symbolic however historic, marking the work’s first efficiency at Carnegie Corridor – a belated arrival for a concerto nonetheless absent from the mainstream repertoire. With Pinchas Zukerman as soloist, the efficiency carried a particular resonance: an artist lengthy related to the Israel Philharmonic giving voice to one among Israel’s foundational composers. Zukerman’s tone, burnished and unhurried, formed the music much less as a car for bravura than as an prolonged tune. Beneath Lahav Shani’s attentive path, the orchestra projected heat and readability, permitting Ben-Haim’s modal inflections and supple rhythms to breathe. Within the cadenza, Zukerman formed the road with an virtually improvisatory freedom, the introspective tone reinforcing the music’s avoidance of sheer virtuosity. But the concerto itself stays emotionally reticent – melodious however curiously static, its gestures polished relatively than pressing, its rhetoric extra ornamental than compelling. For all its craftsmanship, the rating by no means fairly sustains the dramatic rigidity wanted to totally interact the listener. Nonetheless, the outcome nonetheless represented a testomony to the dialogue between exile and belonging, reminiscence and reinvention, which runs by means of a lot of twentieth-century Jewish artwork.
As an encore, Zukerman provided the composer’s ‘Berceuse sfaradite’ (‘Sephardic Lullaby’), a piece whose quiet intimacy appeared to condense his whole type into miniature. Its modal inflections and gentle oscillations, drawn from Sephardic tune, unfolded with unforced heat – a short, inward flip that exposed the lyrical core of Ben-Haim’s voice.
If Ben-Haim’s music embodied a cultural overlap, Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes stood on the reverse pole – a Russian modernist’s stylized encounter with Jewish folklore, translated into the crisp vocabulary of his early neoclassicism. Initially conceived for an émigré ensemble he encountered in New York, the orchestral model heard right here transforms klezmer melody and rhythm into one thing taut and urbane, translating its dance impulses right into a extra formal expressive body. The clarinet line, by turns plaintive and sardonic, evokes a world already vanishing, refracted by means of Prokofiev’s irony. But on this efficiency, its supply was a contact too contained, blunting the music’s klezmer chew. Shani formed the overture with a light-weight contact, letting the phrasing breathe relatively than caricaturing its people inflections. As a bunch, the Israel Philharmonic’s woodwinds introduced appeal and agility, whereas the strings provided a heat undercurrent that hinted at nostalgia greater than parody. Heard earlier than Ben-Haim, Prokofiev’s stylized encounter with the Jewish musical idiom appeared each distant and foreboding – a indifferent reflection on what his successor would later make private.
After the interval, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4 – by far probably the most recognizable rating on this system – reclaimed the emotional supply of the night’s journey: the Romantic ultimate that each Prokofiev and Ben-Haim, from their distinct Russian and Central-European vantage factors, would every reinterpret and paraphrase in their very own idioms. The rendition testified to the cohesion the ensemble has attained underneath Shani, the strings enjoying with specific richness and adaptability. He approached the rating with structural readability and unforced dramatic pacing, resisting extra in favor of long-breathed continuity.
The opening fanfare, weighty but unsentimental, established destiny not solely as motif however as architectural precept. Within the ensuing actions, his management of steadiness and phrasing drew consideration to the symphony’s contrapuntal intricacies relatively than its rhetoric. The Andantino unfolded with lyrical endurance, the Israel Philharmonic’s strings cultivating a darkish heat that linked naturally to the sonorities beforehand heard in Ben-Haim’s concerto, whereas the Scherzo’s pizzicatos had an virtually balletic poise. Within the Finale, his pacing preserved the music’s exuberance with out tipping into bombast; its vitality remained taut, its brilliance clear. The efficiency conveyed Tchaikovsky’s emotional candor by means of self-discipline, not abandon – a studying that closed this system’s cross-cultural arc with coherence and dignity. The ebullience of the final bars was heightened by the encore, the ‘Russian Dance’ from The Nutcracker, provided with verve and precision.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Picture: Lahav Shani conducts the Israel Philharmonic © Stephanie Berger
