EWCJS-library transformed into chamber music space
On Dec 8, the wood-paneled library at 147 BSR transformed into a performance space for a Boston-area premiére of Jonathan Berger’s “Bridal Canopy,” performed by the BU-CFA affiliated Arneis Quartet. A select group of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and friends of the Elie Wiesel Center present at what acting-director Michael Zank called an “informal salon,” was treated to an extraordinary musical moment, the likes of which the former Weld-family residence may have experienced in the late 19th-century, but not in recent memory. Peter Zazofsky, master-violinist and member of BU’s Muir String Quartet, and others commented on the acoustic quality of the space and fell in love with it at first sight: this place was made for chamber music!
The evening was introduced by Prof. Abigail Gillman (MLCL) who shared her enthusiasm for Sh. Y. Agnon, the author of the story “The Bridal Canopy” on which the composition is based. Hakhnasat Kallah, as the story is called in Hebrew, was the first novel published by the 1966 Nobel laureate. As Gillman showed, the ironic tale of the hasid Reb Yudel alludes to great figures in the western canon, such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, while rendering a yiddish-speaking world, replete with subversive intertextual connections to Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash, in modern Hebrew. While thereby being meticulously and authentically “Jewish,” Agnon creates an utterly human tale that appeals to every reader.
The Stanford University-based composer explained how he used the often surprising twists and turns in Agnon’s tale of a wandering Jew into musical ideas and gave the audience a few pointers of what to listen for in the four movements of the piece. The center-piece of the evening was a transformative performance of music that proceeded from a starkly dissonant opening that, according to Berger, attempted to create the perhaps ugliest noise a string quartet can produce, to a fast-paced sequence of different moods with moments of metallic character. With the second movement, the music becomes more conciliatory, wavering between the humorous and the haunting, to culminate in a requiem for Galicia, the world of Czaczkes from Buczacz, the original home of Agnon, who while shedding his original name nevertheless immortalized the world from which he had hailed.
The Arneis Quartet had been the first group to perform this technically challenging piece at a festival in China, but played it twice this week in Boston, and the musicians were enthusiastic about the fact that, at the Elie Wiesel Center’s salon event, they were finally able to move from focusing on the technical aspects to really bringing the music to live. The space helped: it felt as if the library itself were a musical instrument.