The Beauty of Hebrew in Five Love Songs
Thanks Eric Whitacre and Hila Plitmann!
Commentary and story time for Paolo coming right up!
Writing about this small set of Hebrew love songs is sort of personal, not to mention as well it shows my general appreciation of Jewish culture. I first encountered these five songs when I was a graduate assistant back at Western Illinois University since I was the rehearsal pianist for the concert choir’s second concert of the spring semester. They performed the set in one of many (!) arrangements Whitacre made owing to so many commissions of the work. Of course, Whitacre is American, so the Jewish character of these songs came to be through his then girlfriend Hila Plitmann, as she is Israeli. The two met during their studies in Juilliard and spent some time together when invited to Germany to perform at a friend’s place. During their vacation, the poems were written and set to song in the Swiss Alps, then performed a week afterwards in Germany. For a more detailed account, here is Whitacre himself talking about the origins of the piece (information taken from his website):
In the spring of 1996, my great friend and brilliant violinist Friedemann Eichhorn invited me and my girlfriend-at-the-time Hila Plitmann (a soprano) to give a concert with him in his home city of Speyer, Germany. We had all met that year as students at the Juilliard School and were inseparable.
Because we were appearing as a band of traveling musicians, ‘Friedy’ asked me to write a set of troubadour songs for piano, violin and soprano. I asked Hila (who was born and raised in Jerusalem) to write me a few ‘postcards’ in her native tongue, and a few days later she presented me with these exquisite and delicate Hebrew poems. I set them while we vacationed in a small skiing village in the Swiss Alps, and we performed them for the first time a week later in Speyer.
The original instrumentation is already lovely in itself, so intimate in character —my favorite. I did catch recordings of the other instrumentations for it like the choir and string quartet version and they are awesome too. As someone who loves art songs, the intimacy of the small ensemble is hard to beat —an exception is given to orchestral ones of course, if done right. Here are the five songs:
Temuná (A Picture)
Kalá kallá (Light Bride)
Laróv (Mostly)
Ézye shéleg! (What Snow!)
Rakút (Tenderness)
Owing to how brief the songs are, especially the third one, it is right for Whitacre to call the lyrics as “postcards”. Each of these songs capture the moments Whitacre and Plitmann spent together. Temuná talks of the image of the beloved engrained in a person’s heart, Kalá kallá is a Hebrew pun Whitacre thought of and the lyrics themselves foreshadow the beauty of his bride, Laróv is all about intimacy, Ézye shéleg paints the beauty of snow falling down, and Rakút shows the difference of character between a couple —tender and hard— and how even then, the beauty of intimacy shows. Of course, as this is music that is not patterned after the Western European tradition, the beauty of the music lies in its depiction of a Hebraic character. The choice of piano and violin for instruments adds a rich sense of romanticism that fills the hall with a beautiful sense of intimacy, nothing extreme on anybody’s end.
Here is the short set sung by Plitmann herself, with Ruth Bruegger on the violin and Tali Tadmor on the piano:
For a bigger ensemble featuring a string quartet and choir, here is Whitacre himself conducting the Bel Canto Choir Vilnius and the string quartet of the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra: