“A diverse collection of works written by American Jewish composers…. The cultural contribution they made, and are still making, to American music and the arts is invaluable and incalculable. The Milken Archive has documented  a significant portion…. of that legacy.”

 

This new CD features liturgical works commissioned and premiered in America - two Sabbath evening services and a Hallel (praise) Service of Psalms for Festivals and other celebratory occasions - by three composers who were born or educated in Germany and immigrated to Palestine during the 1920s and ‘30s.

 

Two of them, Paul Ben-Haim and Marc Lavry were among the most successful and prominent composers in Israel, beginning with their roles in the musical life of the y’shuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine during the British Mandate). On the international music scene, they were the composers most often associated with what has been called the “Mediterranean style”—an appealing synthesis of the exotic sounds, idioms, and reflections of the land of Israel and the wider Jewish orient with the more familiar musical forms and procedures of the European classical canon described by Milken Archive Artistic Director Neil Levin as “emblematic of the new cultivated art music of modern Israel.”