Niv Ashkenazi: Violins of Hope
Albany Records

Much attention will be given to the instrument violinist Niv Ashkenazi plays on his debut album—justifiably so—but as much should go to the calibre of the performances he and pianist Matthew Graybil, Juilliard graduates both, bring to this special recording. The album takes its name from a project founded by Israeli luthiers Amnon Weinstein and his son Avshalom whereby instruments owned by Jewish musicians before and during the Holocaust are collected and refurbished to concert quality so that their voices can be heard anew. The violins in the collection (the Weinsteins have restored nearly seventy) were played in the concentration camps and ghettos; Ashkenazi's is the first solo album to have been recorded on one of those instruments. He also holds the distinction of being the only violinist in the world to have an instrument from the collection on long-term loan.

Active as solo and chamber musicians, Ashkenazi and Graybil bring formidable technical prowess, unerring command, and musicality to the hour-long recording. There's an authenticity to these performances that shows how deeply the album's content and the 'Violins of Hope' project resonate with both artists. Adding to the material's resonance, many of the composers featured were directly affected by the Holocaust. All but one of the selections are twentieth-century pieces, the exception Israeli-American composer Sharon Farber's arrangement of a movement from her 2014 cello concerto Bestemming, performed in a four-hands arrangement with actor Tony Campisi narrating. While the album was recorded at at California State University in July 2019, Ashkenazi and Graybil first collaborated on a 'Violins of Hope' project in Sarasota, Florida in 2017.

The album seduces from its opening number, Serenade, the only surviving work by Robert Dauber who wrote it in 1942 in Theresienstadt before being transported to Auschwitz and then Dachau, where he died of typhoid in 1945 at twenty-six. In addition to the tune's heartfelt ache, Ashkenazi's sweetly singing tone, especially when buoyed by Graybil's empathetic support, makes Dauber's song the perfect scene-setter. John Williams' Theme from Schindler's List holds a special place in Ashkenazi's heart, given that its melody was written for Itzhak Perlman under whom he studied at Juilliard. (Interestingly, the teacher chose not to share his bowings and fingerings with his eager student so that he'd develop his own interpretation.) Like much of the recording, the playing overflows with emotion, with the violinist caressing the poignant theme with conviction. It hardly surprises that many pieces ache with longing and sadness. There's playfulness, too, however, in the dance rhythms that give pieces such as Julius Chajes's The Chassid and George Perlman's Dance of the Rebbitzen an impish tone that lightens the album's mournful moments.

The focus of Farber's Bestemming, a concerto for cello, narrator, and orchestra, is Curt Lowens, a Holocaust survivor and hero of the Dutch Resistance who saved more than 150 Jewish children. For this recording, the work's haunting final movement, "Triumph,” is performed, with the composer appearing alongside Graybil as the second pianist and Campisi giving evocative voice to Lowens' recollections. Though Polish composer Szymon Laks was arrested and sent to Auschwitz in 1941, where he served as the concertmaster of the Birkenau Men's Camp Orchestra, he survived and after war's end resumed his career as a composer. He's represented on the album by Trois pièces de concert, which ranges from the high-spirited “Prelude varie” and lyrical “Romance” to the breezy hyperdrive of “Mouvement perpetuel.”

Swiss composer Ernest Bloch, who was born to Jewish parents and composed Jewish works in the 1910s and 1920s, is represented by Nigun, a passionate setting packed with emotional outpourings he wrote in 1923 while living in the United States. Two works by Paul Ben-Haim are performed, the first Berceuse sfaradite a touching rendition of a Sephardic folk song, the second Three Songs Without Words, which extends from the hushed “Arioso” to the heart-wrenching “Sephardic Melody.” Also included, from his Deux melodies hebraïques, is Maurice Ravel's affecting lamentation Kaddish (“holy”).

June 2020