Baal Shem Suite evokes Jewish Holy Days

By Eileen Wingard

Eileen Wingard

SAN DIEGO — Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem Suite is music that fits the High Holidays. The first movement, Vidui, is the Yom Kippur confessional prayer; the second movement, Nigun, encompasses cantorial pleading with the Heavenly Power; and the final movement, Simchat Torah, reflects the joy of receiving the Torah.

My sister, concert violinist, Zina Schiff, has devoted much of her career to championing  Jewish music, and the Baal Shem Suite is one of her signature pieces.

Zina attributes her love of Jewish music to her  childhood seeped in “Yiddishkeit.” “Daddy used to sing Hebrew and Yiddish songs, and I would sit between Grandma and Uncle Hy at the old Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, listening to Cantor Carl Urstein.”

Shortly after her Bat Mitzvah, Zina appeared on the TV program, “Essence of Judaism,” playing the Bloch Nigun.

At a later recital at the University of Judaism, where Zina played the Nigun as an encore, California Jewish Voice recounted how it “throbbed vividly with an innately ‘Jewish’ ardour that was heart-warming.

As winner of the Junior Auditions of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Zina performed the Baal Shem Suite with that venerated ensemble under the direction of William Smith, assistant conductor. It had not been  programmed since Mischa Elman  performed it with them three decades earlier.   Smith wrote to Zina: “your performance with us was GREAT!! The members of the orchestra still talk of you, your charming appearance, your poise, and (above all) of your playing!”

In a 1974 recital in San Diego, the San Diego Union reported, “For deeply felt and conveyed emotion, no work of the evening was more beautifully given than Ernest Bloch’s “Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Live.” “These pieces… were played with an intense abandon that was deeply affecting.”

When Zina gave another recital at San Diego State University, the San Diego Reader described, “the brooding and ecstatic mysticism of Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem Suite, “ and how “the audience could identify so totally with all these varied works because Miss Schiff identified with them so totally herself. “

Of her 1997 performance at the Lyceum Theater as part of the Lipinsky Jewish Arts Festival, the San Diego Jewish Times wrote of the Baal Shem Suite, “This work is one of the landmarks of Hebraic expression in chamber music. Its three movements, Vidui, Nigun, and Simchat Torah, irradiate tradition as few works do, and Zina’s rendition was so authoritative and consummate, that it could be called one of the definitive performances we are likely to ever hear. “

Of Zina’s playing of the Baal Shem Suite on her All-Bloch CD, Classics Today wrote: “Zina Schiff plays this music with exceptional passion and commitment.”

“The final movement (Rejoicing) of Baal Shem lives up to its title as in few other performances.”

The All Music Guide reported: “Zina Schiff is a first-rate violinist fully up to the music’s tremendous technical challenges, and a first-rate musician who can get inside the soul of Bloch’s extravagantly expressive music.”

MusicWeb International said, “Schiff’s mixture of improvisatory abandon and emotional commitment are very hard to beat.”

To enhance your final days of the holidays, here, featuring Zina as the violin soloist, is Bloch’s Baal Shem Suite.

Vidui from the Baal Shem Suite (track 4)

Nigun (track 5) Ernest Bloch, Zina Schiff, violin, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Jose Serebrier, conductor Naxos 2006

Simchat Torah (track 6)

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Eileen Wingard, a retired violinist with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts.