Department of Music

On November 20 at 8:00 pm in Brooks Hall Commons, the McIntire Department of Music and the UVA Jewish Studies Program present a solo piano recital of twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli art music by Assaf Shelleg, the 2011-12 Israeli Visiting Assistant Professor in the Jewish Studies Program.
 
The program will focus on composers’ portrayal of nationalism and music history. The recital will open with Brahms’ transcription for the left hand of Bach’s Chaconne in d minor, from the latter’s Partita for Solo Violin in d minor (BWV 1004). In contrast to the narrow definitions of exclusionary nationalism that had developed in Germany, Brahms’ implicit anti-Wagnerian style points to a more inclusive formulation which may be seen as a model for some Jewish composers in the twentieth-century.
 
The following compositions on the first half of the program—penned by Jewish composers in Florence, Vienna, and Berlin during the mid 1920s—display similar inclusiveness. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s (1895-1968) Three Chorals on Hebrew Melodies fuses modern adaptations of Bach’s choral-preludes with Jewish themes the composer reconstructed from Jewish Italian-Sephardic liturgy. Four Jewish Dances by the cellist and composer Yehoyachin Stutschewsky (1891-1982) displays unequivocal allusions to Eastern European Jewish folk music, yet straddles the divide between art and folk music. Finally, Eastern Visions by the Berliner Erich Sternberg (1891-1974) unfolds Neo-Baroque polyphonic settings, attesting to his outsider view of both the music of Eastern European Jewry and the East he had seen in his annual visits to mandatory Palestine during the mid 1920s.

The second half of the concert will include compositions by Israeli composers Tzvi Avni (b. 1927) and Ron Weidberg (b. 1953) who, together, present a remarkable dialogue between Jewishness and Israeliness. Whereas Avni introduces reconfigured Eastern European Jewish musical markers through his distinctive musical vocabulary, Weidberg converses with the history of music and creates a blend of musical styles ranging from Bach through Chopin to popular American and Israeli musics. Having studied contemporary improvisation, Shelleg will also perform an untitled improvisational work at the end of the concert.

Musicologist and pianist Assaf Shelleg is the 2011-12 Israeli Visiting Assistant Professor in the Jewish Studies Program at UVA. From 2009-11 he was the Efroymson Visiting Israeli Scholar in the Department of Jewish, Islamic & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. Shelleg researches twentieth century Jewish and Israeli art music, focusing on the migration of musical idioms associated with Jewishness and their acquired meanings in Europe, America, mandatory Palestine, and Israel. These topics are dealt with in his articles as well as in his forthcoming book, Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History. In addition to his academic career, Shelleg performs mainly as a soloist with the repertoire he is researching and has toured Europe and the US with solo recitals of modern and postmodern music.