Edited by e-mail: arts@irish-times.ie Nemtsov’s stumble ... · many who havenever seen or read...

JaschaNemtsov(above) hasworked toilluminate thework of theTerezíncomposers,including PavelHaas (left) andViktor Ullmann(top right)

SavedPeacock, Dublin

Peter Crawley

If Edward Bond’s feverish polemic of1965 is known here at all, it is because ofone infamous scene, so grisly in concept,so notorious in performance, sohistorically indelible that it has becomealmost legendary: the stoning to death ofa baby in a pram. This, the reason for itsoriginal ban from the London stage,often functions as a plot synopsis formany who have never seen or read theplay. Saved: that play about stoningbabies.

Given a rare opportunity to see thescene in context, such as Jimmy Fay’sstark new staging at the Peacock, Bond’sdrama appears no less horrifying, but hismessage has inevitably lost its power. Analmost apocalyptically bleak view of aculturally and socially impoverishedworking-class Britain, blown up and overamplified, it aims to shake us to the core.

That Bond, with his second play,needed to shout so loud suggests hethought his audience was especially hardof hearing. For all the slow torture of itsmost controversial scene, the play’smore disturbing moment comes earlier,when a young mother turns up thevolume of a television set to drown outher baby’s cries.

Bond’s sympathies certainly lie withthe downtrodden – capitalist society is toblame for such moral disintegration,goes the clarion cry of Saved – but thisgrotesque imagining of the desensitisedmasses could have sprung from the sameelitist well of doom as the deadenedcrowds of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. Apoor response to Bond’s threateningvision of working-class degradation is toreject it. A far worse one is to accept it.

Jimmy Fay has treated Saved withutmost fidelity, however, his excellentcast negotiating the play’s unflinchingtone, its queasy comedy and the staccatorhythm of a once-naturalistic SouthLondon argot that may now read likeparody: “Yer d’narf fidget.” “I’m ‘andywith me ‘ands.” “What a carry on!” TomVaughan-Lawlor as the conflicted,

slight-framed Len is the characterallowed to come closest to decency(which is not particularly close),standing by the irredeemable youngmother Pam (Eileen Walsh, very good ina troublingly unconvincing part), whileRory Keenan appropriately underplayshis clench-jawed, charismatically loucheFred. Eleanor Methven and PaulMoriarty offer strong support as Pam’sstalemated parents, the claustrophobiaof their lives dictating the unreal anglesof Paul O’Mahony’s set.

However committed the production, itcan’t make the play feel any morepolitically potent. Bond doesn’t allow usthe catharsis of tragedy, aiming insteadfor the spurring effect of agit-prop. Withthe left-wing hopes of the 1960s now allbut expired, we are left instead with anunanswerable violence that leaves yousickened, cowed and powerless; itsimages stirring up memories of a toddlerslain by two school children or theincomprehensible death of a youngfamily. After all these years, Saved is stillwith us, but salvation seems far away.

◆ Runs until May 26

ConcordeHugh Lane gallery, Dublin

Michael Dungan

Elaine Agnew – Calligraphy. Si-Hyun Yi – An IslandBaby. Zhou Long – Secluded Orchid. NicolaLeFanu – Sextet

The four works in this concert were allcomposed within the past 10 years, all bywomen, all featuring textures as aprimary concern.

Elaine Agnew’s 2002 Calligraphy, forexample, opens with a variety of languid,ear-balming textures: a lonely solo foralto flute, blends of clarinet and flutewith strings, then with vibraphone. Thewhole was an evocative response to theshifting colours of prairie grass ripplingin the wind.

There is a similar instrumentalline-up, with piano and no vibraphone, inAn Island Baby, receiving its firstperformance in the presence of thecomposer Si-Hyun Yi, who flew inspecially from her native Korea. She

describes it as “a lullaby composed offour songs”.

Here, a warm, delicate texture wasestablished in quite a long introductionby the players before soprano TineVerbeke made her subtle entry, soundingalmost like another instrument. The fourpieces conjure up images of mother andbaby on a beach, of an infant’s chatter, ofsoftness and sweetness.

There was a more forthright evocationof Asia in the pentatonic flavours ofSecluded Orchid, a 1999 piano trio byBeijing-born Zhou Long. Inspired bymusic alleged by legend to come fromConfucius, its sampling of emotionsfrom anger through melancholy toexhilaration was brought to life byviolinist Elaine Clark’s lyrical playing,and the echoes and pedals and interplaywith cellist David James and pianist JaneO’Leary.

Nicola LeFanu’s 1997 Sextet for flutes,clarinets, percussion, violin, cello andpiano presented a series of episodeslinked to the flora and fauna of the westof Ireland. Not as programmaticallystructured as Mussorgsky’s Pictures atan Exhibition, it nonetheless drew on andreflected the composer’s experiences ofwalks in Galway and Clare.

A pleasing element of this concert wasthe brief but informative notes providedin the printed programme. But whatmade it one of the most enjoyableConcorde concerts of recent times wasthe assured control of phrasing, balancesand ensemble by conductor DermotDunne.

Nemtsov’s stumble into grace

It was, says Jascha Nemtsov, purechance that he came to be a musi-cian. He was born in Siberia in 1963,and moved to Leningrad (now St Pe-

tersburg) when he was two. His older sis-ter played the piano, and he began in time-honoured fashion by imitating what shewas doing. But his is not the story of a pro-digious talent, learning outrageously diffi-cult pieces by ear, or quickly passing outhis sister in achievement. The piano wasa hobby.

When he was around ten or 11 his moth-er took him aside for a serious conversa-tion about the future. What was he goingto study? “I had a great interest in mathe-matics and history,” he recalls, “and evenin philosophy. But it was a problem in theSoviet Union that it was not allowed forthe Jews to study some professions.There were quotas for Jews. It was not of-ficial, but everybody knew about it. Oneof the few areas in which there were nolimitations was music. My mother askedme whether I would like to make somemore music and learn it properly, and Ihad nothing against it. And so I ended upin music school.”

The Leningrad he grew up in had a lotto offer a budding musician. The Lenin-grad Philharmonic was in the hands ofthe legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky. Thegreat Russian players of the day were tobe heard regularly. The four he choosesto list make an interesting contrast: EmilGilels and Sviatoslav Richter (both wellknown in the West), but also Yakov Flierand Yakov Zak (both more highly regard-ed at home than abroad).

His own teacher, Alexander Icharev,was, he says, “not a star. But he was agood teacher. He taught not technique,but aesthetics. For me as a child it wasnot enough. What I needed at the timewas technique.” The aesthetics were use-ful much later, but as a student he read alot and benefited greatly from the writ-ings of Heinrich Neuhaus, the man whotaught Richter, Gilels and Radu Lupuamong many others.

Nemtsov’s own reputation as a musi-cian is based on his explorations of Jew-ish music, particular in the unearthing oflittle-known works by early 20th-centuryRussian composers who set out to writein a specifically Jewish style. But hisawareness of this repertoire was actuallyminimal during his years in Leningrad.

In spite of the fact that his family was“really conscious of our Jewish origin”and that he describes his father as reli-gious, “I had no information about Jewishmusic, and no access to the sources. Theonly Jewish music I heard was religiousmusic at the synagogue, or from my fa-ther at home, and then some Jewish folksongs. And in the early 1970s it was stillpossible to buy some records with Jewishfolk songs.” But even that became moredifficult, as singers emigrated.

It was after his move to Stuttgart in1992 that things began to happen. “I feltfree to say I was Jewish for the first time.

I came in contact with some people whowere working on Jewish matters, aboveall with a musicologist, Beate Schröder-Nauenburg, who was engaged on aproject about composers who were vic-tims of the Holocaust. I met her, also justby chance, and she asked me to take partin a concert programme, accompanyingsome songs of the Terezín composers, Ul-lmann, Haas and so on.” Terezín (Ther-esienstadt in German) was a concentra-tion camp in what is now the Czech Re-public where many artists were sent andwhich was used as a propaganda tool bythe Nazis. Terezín composers featured inthe Decca label’s Entartete Musik series,which focused on the music branded “de-generate” by the Nazis. Viktor Ullmann’sopera The Emperor of Atlantis was pre-sented by Opera Theatre Company in2002, Pavel Haas’s Sarlatan by the Wex-ford Festival in 1998.

“I was very fascinated by the musicand by the composers’ lives and their ter-rible fate. I also studied a solo pro-gramme with music by these composers,and performed both programmes manytimes in Germany. It was really the begin-ning of my career as a pianist. In Russia Ididn’t give any concerts at all. I complet-ed my studies, did military service, andthen worked as an accompanist at the mu-sic school.”

The personal connection to the Te-rezín composers was very direct.“The Holocaust is something Ilearned about as a verysmall child. In our fami-ly, there were manyvictims, my grandpar-ents among them,my uncles andaunts. Both frommy father’s sideand my mother’sside, most mem-bers were killedby Germans.The Holocaustwas very presentto me from thevery beginning ofmy conscious life.And now I had achance to do some-thing in my professionabout this. It was reallyexciting for me.”

BUT THERE WAS ALSO a big musi-cal surprise involved. He had always ac-cepted that “the good music is known”and that “when the composers are un-known they are not good”. The music ofthe Terezín composers flatly contradict-ed that, and his interest in this new reper-toire also led him to musicology.

“Later, when I was better at German, Iread a lot of what was published aboutthis music that I was not content with.When I play the pieces, I think I havemore understanding of the musical struc-tures and contents than some musicolo-

gist who’s onlyhaving a look at

the score.” Andwhen he aired his

ideas, he was invit-ed to write about the

music himself.“That was the begin-

ning of my musical re-search. They were the first pub-

lications in my life.” One specialisa-tion led to another. In 1995 he was prepar-ing for a performance of Ullmann’s Dou-ble Concerto for flute and piano with theconductor Israel Yinon, the man who wasto conduct Pavel Haas in Wexford.

“He said to me: ‘Jascha, you come fromRussia and you know there were someRussian Jewish composers who nobodyknows now, for example Achron orSaminsky or Gnessin. It would be interest-ing for you, you should look into it, youmight find a lot there.’

“So first, together with Beate, I went to

Berlin, to the Staatsbibliothek, the mostimportant German music library, and or-dered what they had of these composers.We got a lot of printed music from the1920s, went to a separate room with agrand piano, and I played some of thepieces. I must say it was one of the mostimportant days in my life.

“It was not only interesting music byunknown composers, but it sounded real-ly Jewish to me.” He scoured other librar-ies in Germany, procured scores fromabroad, and went back to Russia, to re-search in Moscow and St Petersburg.He’s since written and edited books on

the school of composition he helped re-discover, and recorded widely, includingcollaborations with violinist and conduc-tor Dmitry Sitkovetsky (a former princi-pal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra), vi-ola player Tabea Zimmermann, cellistDavid Geringas, and in an upcoming re-lease, clarinettist Chen Halevi and the Vo-gler String Quartet.

THE MOVEMENT TO WRITE Jewish mu-sic can be traced back to 1908, when a Jew-ish folk music society was established inSt Petersburg.

“It was the first Jewish musical institu-tion in the world, the first secular Jewishmusical institution, apart from syna-gogue music or cantors’ societies and soon. It was the first society for Jewish artmusic, although it was called the Societyfor Jewish Folk Music. It’s a bit complicat-ed. The idea was a society for Jewish mu-sic. But the authorities denied the use ofthis name, because they thought there

was no Jewish music, so it was called Soci-ety for Jewish Folk Music.” The most in-teresting period, he says, was the 1920sand 1930s. “The first works, created be-fore the Russian Revolution, were morefolkloristic, arrangements of Jewish folksongs. In the 1920s and 1930s the Jewishmusic got a kind of ripeness. It was themost important period. In Russia in the1930s the movement was suppressed bythe Stalinists, and the Jewish musical in-stitutions were dissolved. By the 1930smost composers of this school lived al-ready in the West, in Austria, the US,some also in Palestine.

“The movement existed until the sec-ond World War, after which it was affect-ed by the stylistic changes in modern mu-sic, and the fact that the national move-ments were not up to date any more. Na-tionalism was associated with somethingevil, with fascism, with racism. Modernmusic became much more universal.Most of the composers who participatedin this school died in the 1940s, 1950s,1960s. Some new trends arose in Israel,oriental trends, the desire to create some-thing new, something Israeli. And in Eu-rope there was no Jewish public anymore for this music, no audience.

“It was a whole complex of reasonswhy this music was forgotten after thewar, and the direction was not continued.There are still composers who write in arecognisably Jewish style, but the move-ment and the sense of community that itdepended on are long dead.”

The Vogler Spring Festival will featurenon-Jewish-sounding works by compos-ers of Jewish background (Mendelssohn,Mahler), Jewish-sounding works by Jew-ish composers (Milhaud, Achron, GrigoriKrein, the latter two associated with theSociety for Jewish Folk Music) and non-Jewish (Ravel, Shostakovich), and anumber of “Hebrew” songs by Russiancomposers where the Jewishness is aboutas authentic as the Irishness of Irish stewwith curry powder. And there’s also a late-night concert by David Orlowsky’s Klez-morim. Now there’s something JaschaNemtsov could tell you a thing or twoabout.

◆ Jascha Nemtsov plays at the VoglerSpring Festival, which runs at St Colum-ba’s Church, Drumcliffe, Co Sligo, from Fri-day until Monday. Tel: 01-5059582 or071-9144956

TheArtsEdited by Deirdre Falvey e-mail: arts@irish-times.ie

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Reviews

Pianist Jascha Nemtsov might have stumbledinto a musical career, but his work as a Jewishmusicologist marks him out as a master of hiscraft, writes Michael Dervan

‘I was very fascinated by themusic and by the composers’lives and their terrible fate’

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