Paul Ben-Haim - Rhapsody for Piano Solo and Strings | Ofra Yitzhaki, Nir Cohen-Shalit

Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984) - Rhapsody for Piano Solo and Strings (1971)
Ofra Yitzhaki | Piano | www.ofra-yitzh...
Israel Camerata Jerusalem
Cond. Nir Cohen-Shalit | www.nircohensh...
From the concert “Memories of a Lost World”, Tel-Aviv, July 2024
Paul Ben-Haim was born in Munich to a well-to-do Jewish family, the Frankenburgers. After learning to play violin, viola, and piano, he studied composition and conducting at the Munich Music Academy, excelling to the extent that he was appointed assistant conductor to the great Bruno Walter at the Bavarian State Opera. Four years later, he gained the coveted position of Kapellmeister and choir conductor at the Augsburg Opera House while working parallelly on composing orchestral pieces, chamber works, and art songs. In 1932, the young Kapellmeister was dismissed from his position at Augsburg because of his Jewishness. Frankenburger decided to focus on composition, and among other things, he wrote the oratorio “Yoram” based on “The Book Yoram (Joram)” by Rudolf Borchardt.
In March 1933, two days after the Reichstag Fire, one of his concertos was played in Chemnitz, Saxony, and the Nazi press poured fire and brimstone on the “event.” Maestro Frankenburger realized that the country of his birth was no longer his homeland, and in October 1933, he was already living with his wife in Tel Aviv. He changed his name to Ben-Haim, and after years of adaptation and studying Hebrew, he returned to composing: two symphonies, concertos, sonatas, songs, chamber music, and liturgical music. His knowledge of Hebrew greatly helped him to be accepted as a teacher at the Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem, where he trained musical figures such as Zvi Avni, Ben-Zion Orgad, Max Brod, Ami Maayani, Noam Sheriff, and Naomi Shemer. Ben-Haim often incorporated Eastern motifs into his works, with which he became acquainted thanks to his friendship with the Bracha Zefira, a singer and musicologist of Yemenite origin and (mainly) Iraqi-born members of the Israel Broadcasting House in Arabic.
The Rhapsody for Piano and Strings is one of Ben-Haim’s most fascinating, captivating, and vivid works. He composed it in 1971 at the commission of a chamber orchestra from Philadelphia, whose soloist was pianist Ruth Zandman Apfel. After its Philadelphia debut, it was also performed in Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, and Haifa with soloist Sarah Fuxon-Heyman.
In 1977, when Ben Haim reached eighty, the work was included in a concert in his honor, described in the program thus: “The strings open the Rhapsody with an oriental motif originating in the biblical cantillation tradition (Ta’amei HaMikra), which is then transferred to more distant scales. The most prominent feature of this motif is the decorative figure at the beginning and the constant hovering around the same tone - a characteristic element in Israeli folk music influenced by Eastern music. This element, Zarka, is based on a biblical cantillation note of this name. The piano leans on the note, expands and processes it, and gives it a different form in the second powerful theme.” Although the Rhapsody is vivacious and zestful, it was almost completely omitted from the Israeli repertoire.