The New York Times: 8 Best Classical Music Moments - Diplomatic Harp

The New York Times
By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

A Valiant Return to the Met Opera: This Week’s 8 Best Classical Music Moments

Diplomatic Harp

The harp is a diplomatic instrument: There is something about its sound, so clear in its attack and so graceful in its decay, that suggests an openness to other points of view. As such it should be a prized chamber-music companion, a point eloquently made by the harpist Sivan Magen in a sparkling concert of music for mixed ensembles. Some of the most beautiful moments found him at his most self-effacing, like in the gorgeous first Interlude for Harp, Clarinet and Cello by Jacques Ibert, in which Mr. Magen’s pealing chords supported a soaring line in the cello with the clarinet — less heard than felt — adding just a hint of a draft in the melody’s sails. 

21CM: Surviving the First Decade

21CM
By Assaff Weisman

The odds of getting an ensemble off the ground can feel like those of launching a new restaurant. Most groups disband within a few short years for reasons that are often similar: Establishing a name in an already crowded market is tough, and the administrative burdens that come with it can make even the most organized group want to crawl into a hole. As the Israeli Chamber Project prepares to celebrate its tenth anniversary, we look back at what brought us here, at the challenges we faced and the lessons we learned along the way.

1
Work With People You Respect

You’ve formed a group and agreed on what to call yourselves – you may even have a couple of concerts lined up. Everyone is energized and the future looks promising, but the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. Soon, you and your new colleagues will face your first challenges – anything from temperamental differences, conflicting opinions on concert offers or how long to hold that fermata. Most likely, you’ll encounter all of these and more.

Conflicts are a natural part of any group dynamic, but when you work with people you respect, it’s much easier to accept those times when your individual input is overruled. You don’t necessarily have to be best friends with your ensemble mates, but what does matter is that you hold each other’s work in high regard and respect one another as people.

With ICP, we had good fortune in that most of our members grew up together in Israel, getting to know one another as part of the country’s small but very lively musical scene. Several of us met as students, so when it was time to come up with a roster, ICP’s founder and clarinetist, Tibi Cziger, already had some people in mind. At the time, pianist Yael Kareth was the only one of us living in Israel. Cziger, cellist Michal Korman, harpist Sivan Magen, violinist Itamar Zorman and I lived in New York, while violist Guy Ben-Ziony and violinist Daniel Bard were based in Europe. Despite the difficulties of running a group across three continents, our commitment to each other as musicians and people strengthened our commitment to the ensemble.

2
Know Your Identity

Knowing your identity is critical for reasons way beyond marketing. Naturally, you want to stand out from other ensembles, but you also need to know what you stand for. Are you a group that champions neglected composers or focuses on the core repertoire? Do your concerts support a broader mission or are you strictly about the music? It is especially powerful if you can point to an origin story, making it easier for people to grasp what sets you apart and why your voice is needed. 

Back in 2008, seven of our eight founding members were pursuing careers outside of Israel – emblematic of a broader “brain drain” from the country, where lack of government funding, little to no private philanthropy and a small market severely limited the possibilities for a sustainable career in chamber music. But we all felt a strong connection to our cultural heritage and, wanting to give back to the community that had first guided us, we saw an opportunity to foster connections within Israel’s fragmented society while bringing a distinct musical energy to audiences abroad. Of course, we wanted to do this in a sustainable manner, which led to the birth of ICP. 

What started as two annual tours across Israel (including places on the periphery, where live classical music is hard to come by, as well as metropolitan centers), quickly became three, and we were fortunate to bring along such distinguished guest artists as Peter Wiley, Antje Weithaas and Liza Ferschtman. Meanwhile, with five of our members in New York, we established a U.S. base of operations for North American tours. Today, though our founding members are still spread across the globe, we’re able to increase our activities on both sides of the Atlantic through a careful expansion of our roster, long-range planning and intensified fundraising.

3
Have a Clear Idea of Each Member’s Role

There is no one way to run a chamber ensemble. You should feel free to create a structure that suits your particular needs, but it’s very important for everyone to know what they’ve signed up for. Are you the kind of group that reaches decisions by consensus, majority vote or top-down action? Who will handle administrative duties? (And the more success you experience, the more of these you’ll have to deal with.) Establishing roles allows each member to assess whether this ensemble is the right fit. In ICP, only two of our artists take on administrative roles. Tibi Cziger serves as the artistic director. He’s responsible both for programming and the logistics of our Israeli tours. Meanwhile, I serve as executive director and I handle our North American activities. Additionally, our board of directors offers invaluable assistance with the running of the organization, and this allows our artists to focus solely on making music.

4
Flexibility is Key

Things happen. Marital statuses change, people have babies, they move to a different country, they sustain injuries. Any one of these can threaten to derail your hard-earned success. Or, you can choose to turn them into opportunities. ICP has experienced everything mentioned and more (think concertizing through a war zone), and we have always tried to extract the positive from any situation. So a geographical move may wind up strengthening the administrative structure, and an injury provides much needed rest for one member while allowing another to shine. When two of our artists – a couple since pre-ICP days – had their first child, we incorporated feeding stops into our travel schedule. All of us took turns babysitting backstage as the new parents performed, bringing the ensemble closer together. Through all the bumps in the road, what kept ICP going was the connection between our exceptional members and a belief in our core mission – to give back to our home country while showcasing Israeli culture abroad. We have faith in our audience to be moved by a wide range of musical styles if we present them with integrity and humility, and we are continually reminded of music’s power to reach across divides of culture, politics and socioeconomics.

No doubt, there are still many opportunities for growth. But here we are, about to celebrate a decade of meaningful music-making, and we’re looking forward to many more. If our experiences can help launch or sustain your ensemble, we would consider that among our successes as well. 

To learn more about the Israeli Chamber Project, visit israelichamberproject.org

Blogcritics: Concert Review - Israeli Chamber Project (NYC, 8 April 2017)

Blogcritics
By Jon Sobel

Mozart, Richard Strauss, and 20th-century composer Jean Françaix were on the menu Friday night at the Baruch Performing Arts Center as three members of the Israeli Chamber Project and guest violist Paul Neubauer served a repast of virtuosity and variety. Presented by the Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center, the program showed off the ensemble’s deep grounding in a wide range of repertoire.

Israeli Chamber Project at Baruch Performing Arts Center

Sandwiched between the Mozart and the Strauss, the performance of Françaix’s 1933 String Trio was my first exposure to the prolific Frenchman’s relatively neglected music. Based on this piece, I’d be happy and interested to hear more. Neither firmly modernist nor strictly neoclassical, the piece begins with a perpetual-motion Allegro, all ghostly agitation on muted strings. The Scherzo jumps with echoes of ragtime, posturing in good-natured mockery of a classical vocabulary. Vaguely jazzy chords also underpin the early strains of the Andante.

Again muted for the final Rondo, the the musicians plunged through a tutti statement and into gently swaying harmonies, passing the melody from instrument to instrument. Carmit Zori (violin), Hillel Zori (cello), and violist Neubauer rendered the entire concise work with sensitivity, grace, and a touch of humor.

The fun Françaix was perhaps all the more effective following Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, K. 493, a mature work that in this performance put me in mind of the astounding String Quintets of Mozart’s final years, as it feels nearly as forward-looking in some aspects. A few slightly rushed passages didn’t reduce the overall sweetness of the first movement as pianist Assaff Weisman merged a ballet-like touch with the string trio’s warm tones. The audience had to bite back an impulse to applaud when the movement ended. (It’s a pity current propriety doesn’t permit that; I think less formality would make classical concerts more widely appealing, and the additional feedback could help musicians distinguish their good performances from their great ones.)

The Larghetto movement begins in a simple lullaby-like mode, then grows with subtle complexity into dense drama. The string players conveyed Mozart’s fascinating harmonies in superb balance, while Weisman played with soft, tasteful restraint without ever sacrificing the clarity that’s all-important in Mozart. This emotional movement is very much a dialogue, and the four musicians spoke its narrative like lifelong friends, delivering with exquisite sensitivity what was to me the most memorable performance of a thoroughly satisfying evening of music.

Then they delved into the laughing recesses of the light-footed and lighthearted Allegretto, with its call-and-response passages, setting up the Françaix trio nicely.

After an intermission came the heavier matter of Richard Strauss’s Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 13. In the Brahmsian first movement of this youthful work, the musicians showed their deep understanding of the Romantic mode – though, to be honest, their performance of the Mozart had left that in little doubt. They achieved an orchestral energy in the striking three-instrument unison passages over rumbling thunder from the piano, and made the galloping Scherzo with its punchy accents an edge-of-your-seat experience. The Trio section felt like a Mendelssohn Venetian Boat Song.

In the Andante they brought out the heavy Rachmaninoff-like melodies and three-against-four rhythms with deep feeling but no schmaltz, and applied equal conviction to the Finale’s percussive energy and sparkling chromatics.

Based in Israel and New York, the Israeli Chamber Project has upcoming concerts in the U.S., Canada, and Israel.

Jewish Journal: Israeli Chamber Project sets sights small for UCLA program

Jewish Journal
By Rick Schultz

When members of the Israeli Chamber Project take the stage at the Jan Popper Theater in UCLA’s Schoenberg Music Building on Feb. 26, their interactions may provide a timely, if unintentional, example for U.S. residents and elected officials to follow amid today’s divisive political culture.

The ensemble’s leaderless music-making process — in the words of one of its pianists, Assaff Weisman — is comparable to the flexibility that successful politics demands.

“The ever-changing role of who leads a piece requires consensus and great respect for each other,” Weisman said. “When we’re on stage, we share in the duties of leadership to make a cohesive whole. Everybody contributes.”

Founded in 2008, the Project consists of distinguished 30-something musicians who get together throughout the year for chamber concerts and educational and outreach programs in Israel, the U.S. and other countries. It currently has 11 members, plus guest artists, who are deployed in different numbers and configurations depending on the program.

At UCLA, three Project members — Weisman, Carmit Zori on violin and Sivan Magen on harp — will take turns performing duets by J. S. Bach, Sebastian Currier, Carlos Salzedo, Claude Debussy and Béla Bartók.

Weisman, who offstage leads the group as its executive director, said “project” is the important word in its name. “We see our mission as ongoing, not finite,” he said. “We’re all about bringing music to as wide a public as possible.”

The UCLA concert, which will begin with Bach’s early 18th-century Sonata for Harpsichord and Violin in B Minor (BMV 1014), arranged for harp by Magen, follows the ensemble’s usual innovative programming of old and new music, except that this time it is traveling light.

“We’re doing a series of duos, which is unusual for us,” Weisman said. “We usually travel with a bigger group.”

Currier’s “Night Time” Suite for harp and violin from 2000, which follows Bach’s sonata, has a special place in the ensemble’s repertory — they performed it for their debut at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 2012.

“The suite’s five short movements traverse different stages of the night,” Weisman said. “They are restless, quietly introspective pieces full of mystery.”

Weisman said he is especially excited about Salzedo’s 1922 Sonata for Harp and Piano. Indeed, the program at UCLA should be a feast for lovers of that ethereal instrument. Salzedo, a French harpist, pianist, composer and conductor from a Sephardic family, who died in 1961, also founded the harp program at the Institute of Musical Art in New York, which became The Juilliard School.

“There are not many works for harp and piano, and this is one of the best,” Weisman said. “It hardly ever gets performed. We try to take risks, and whether we’re performing old or new music, we push the envelope when we can.”

The idea for the Project came from its founder, Tibi Cziger, an Israeli clarinetist who is now its artistic director. Cziger, like Weisman, began his music studies in Israel and continued them at Juilliard.

“There was little to no support for the arts in Israel, so Tibi saw another way for us to develop our careers and address the musical brain-drain at home,” Weisman said. “Our mission became to give back to the places where we started — Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the Haifa area — and to address a situation where musicians are compelled to find a career path elsewhere.”

Weisman recalled the group’s first tour of Israel, during which the musicians found themselves performing a folk piece by Bartók in a small jazz club in the middle of the Negev Desert.

“Children came with their parents and grandparents, and they sat on the floor,” Weisman said. “There was an upright piano that didn’t function well, but I made do. We played Bartók’s ‘Contrasts,’ a trio for clarinet, violin and piano. They were engaged. We saw that as proof that even a challenging piece can go over well in the strangest places.”

As cultural ambassadors, the ensemble has worked with a diverse cross-section of Israeli society, including the Orthodox, Israeli Arabs and Russian immigrants. Its impact and excellence was recognized in 2011 when it was named the winner of the Israeli Ministry of Culture Outstanding Ensemble Award.

In addition to their performances, the Project’s members also give master classes throughout Israel, as well as in the U.S. and Canada. In 2016, the group made its debut in China.

Another part of the group’s mission is supporting the next generation of composers by commissioning new works. In June, it will perform the premiere of a clarinet quintet by Menachem Wiesenberg, and in 2018 it will debut a new work for harp, strings and clarinet by Gilad Cohen.

After its performance at UCLA, the ensemble is scheduled to travel to Israel for a series of concerts from March 21-25, to New York for concerts in April, then back to Israel for a tour in June.

Weisman said the focus of the ensemble’s work and discussions in Israel is usually centered on music, not politics.

“Our interactions with all segments of Israel’s diverse society have always been filled with mutual respect and understanding,” Weisman said. “I find people are happy to leave politics at the door. But by focusing on music, we can, at least momentarily, break down some of the barriers of cultural identity, language and religion.”

The Israeli Chamber Project performs Feb. 26 at 2 p.m. as part of the free Chamber Music at the Clark series at the Jan Popper Theater in the Schoenberg Music Building at UCLA, 445 Charles E. Young Drive, East. Tickets are awarded by lottery. For information on how to enter the lottery, go to 1718.ucla.edu/lottery-info.

The Strad: Review of Israeli Chamber Project's NYC Concert May 5, 2016

The Strad
Review by Leah Hollingsworth

The Israeli Chamber Project played with character and aplomb in this concert at Merkin Hall. The dense score of Weber's Clarinet Quintet was performed with a rich depth that may have seemed a mire overbearing but which conveyed a confident and charismatic energy.

André Caplet's Conte fantastique began with an arresting reading of Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death - on which the piece was based - by actor Michael Cumsty. A sinister entry by violist Dov Scheindlin and cellist Michal Korman gave way to a tumultuous and brilliantly executed performance by all members of the quintet (string quartet and harp). Complex rhythms and myriad extended techniques were well executed and embodied the disturbing and dramatic nature of the text effectively. The piece reached a frenetic climax that verged exhilaratingly on losing control. The ensemble playing was fantastic and harpist Sivan Magen was particularly vibrant.

Although by the end of Brahms's Piano Quintet the string players were obviously fatigued, their performance of this marvellous music was as passionate and heartfelt as the earlier works. Korman's introduction to the finale's theme was absolutely stunning - light but not trite, and played with an optimistic sound tinged with sadness and depth.