Giora Feidman Trio
The Spirit of the Klezmer
Musical Performance Improvised Music & Jazz / Trio / Contemporary Music 0Master clarinetist and citizen of the world Giora Feidman grew up in Buenos Aires in a family of storied musicians and became a key player in the klezmer revival that started in the 1970s. He has spent his career traveling the planet and stirring audiences into an ecstasy with his irresistible version of this musical style—sometimes called “Jewish soul”—that blossomed as part of the Yiddish folk culture of Eastern Europe. Feidman made his Pierre Boulez Saal debut in September 2020 with his trio—including Enrique Ugarte on accordion and Guido Jäger on double bass—and shared the spirit of klezmer in an emotionally resonant and physically animated performance, seen and heard here in its entirety. Derived from the combination of two Hebrew words, “klezmer” as Feidman defines it means “an instrument of song, with a voice to express it.” The Feidman Trio’s brand of spontaneous music-making shifts with ease into other traditions—American jazz, Viennese Classicism, and even improvised arrangements of beloved songs.
The Spirit of the Klezmer
Giora Feidman, Clarinet
Enrique Ugarte, Accordeon
Guido Jäger, Double Bass
“It was as if every note found its way upwards from out the deepest depths of the soul…. He was the incarnation of music itself.” This description of a klezmer musician comes from Sholem Aleichem’s 1888 novel Stempenyu, which is titled after its preternaturally gifted violinist-protagonist. Stempenyu roams—and romances—from shtetl to shtetl, playing for weddings while at the same time moving his audiences with an intensity that borders on the dangerous.
Replace the fiddle with a clarinet, and we can easily imagine Giora Feidman in Aleichem’s description of the soul-stirring musician who similarly taps into an elemental force. Indeed, the master clarinetist has taken the itinerant music-making associated with klezmer to an entirely new level throughout his career. The klezmer players from the twilight of tsarist Russia in some cases acted as a bridge between close-knit shtetl culture and the non-Jewish world beyond by impressing the latter with their thrilling musical skills. Traveling around the globe, Feidman has persistently forged connections between this extraordinary tradition and other kinds of music—and, in the process, reinforced klezmer’s identity as a kind of “fusion” music that amalgamates and cross-pollinates with a limitless spectrum of influences without ever losing its authenticity.
While a significant impetus behind the klezmer revival that started taking off in the 1970s emerged from the Jewish diaspora in the United States, Feidman’s central role helped turn the revival into a genuinely worldwide phenomenon
His intensive touring in Germany, for example, fostered a surging enthusiasm for this musical style that can be seen in such developments as the Klezmer Wochen Weimar (the annual festival that has since been renamed Yiddish Summer Weimar, whose founding artistic director is the klezmer accordionist Alan Bern). Feidman has remained a tireless globetrotter, appearing again and again as a soloist or in one of his several chamber formations. Complementing this vast legacy of live performances is a rich recorded catalogue that has influenced generations of fellow klezmer players. Feidman’s larger cultural impact was further reinforced by his performance of John Williams’s clarinet solos in the score to Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Schindler’s List (1993).
Yet the present program not only marked his debut performance at the Pierre Boulez Saal—and the first here by his trio partners Enrique Ugarte and Guido Jäger—but, as the 84-year-old Feidman asserted after a recent performance in Hamburg, involves another beginning: “For me, every concert is the first concert in my life.” Even if he knows the klezmer repertoire so well it seems an extension of his personality, even if he has made music with these colleagues for many years, each concert unfolds with a spontaneity and sense of discovery that is at the heart of klezmer.
—Thomas May
Notes (excerpt) originally published in the Pierre Boulez Saal program book for the concert of the Giora Feidman Trio on Septemner 11, 2020.
Clarinet
Giora Feidman
Accordeon
Enrique Ugarte
Double Bass
Guido Jäger
Recording
Camera Team
Ede Müller
Franz Thienel
Hans Schauerte
Edition & Colour Grading
Franz Thienel
Direction
Joan Soley
Sound Engineers & Audio Post-Production
Lorenz Fischer, Jacob Mäsel
A Production of the Pierre Boulez Saal © 2020 Pierre Boulez Saal. All rights reserved.