Quintessence of Yehudi Wyner’s Jewish music now on CD

By Eileen Wingard

Tants un Maysele (Dance and Story) is the concluding work on the Milken Archive’s American Jewish Music CD devoted entirely to Wyner’s Jewish music. One of America’s foremost living composers, Wyner has produced a prolific body of work, both secular and Jewish, for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voices, including his Pulitzer-Prize winning Piano Concerto, commissioned and premiered by the Boston
Symphony.

Tants begins as an impressionist-sounding take of a klezmer dance, with the piano providing an incisive pulse and the clarinet adding folksong fragments. It proceeds into a waltz-like section, ending with mysterious dissonance, as if accompanying the tiptoeing of a golem. Maysele intones a beautiful tale, beginning with unison passages in the cello and violin. The single threads of sound soon interweave with the other instrumental voices. The movement ends softly, the final whispers of a heartrending story. It is performed by Daniel Stepner, violin, faculty Brandeis and Harvard Universities, Bruce Creditor, clarinet, Jennifer Langham, cello and Yehudi Wyner, piano. This work was written in 1981 as a tribute to his father, Lazar Weiner, the renowned composer of Yiddish Art Songs. Tants un Maysele was the last of his son’s compositions Weiner heard before his death the following year.

The Wyner CD opens with a thirteen-part suite from the incidental music for Isaac Bashevis Singer’s play, The Mirror, composed in 1972-3. The plot
is based on the inner life of a Jewish Shtetl woman whose mirror is haunted by a demon.

From the  Demon’s Welcome, a macabre percussive dance, to the final March: Wolf and Sheep, Wyner, in his imaginative score, reflects the fantasy of the story. He, himself, is the speaker in the Incantation, where he describes “a retinue of demons…one on a stick, one on  a hedgehog, and one on a snake.” The  Wedding Dances have slow and fast sections, with the violin’s lyrical Hassidic tune contrasting with the clarinet’s energetic Freilach, all in a surrealistic setting. The four instrumentalists and the four singers are superb. Richard Stoltzman, America’s most famous clarinet soloist, heads the roster which includes Daniel Stepner, violin, Robert Schultz, percussion, James Guttman, double bass, Carol Meyer, soprano, Judi Brown Kirchner, mezzo, Matthew Kirchner, tenor, and Richard Lalli, baritone.

The five movements of the Passover Offering, written in 1959, once again exhibits Wyner’s mastery of programmatic composition. The first movement, Lento (Oppression, Enslavement), opens with cello pizzicato, later joined by flute and clarinet, reflecting sadness and
depression. The second movement, Energico (Uprising, Plague, Exodus by Sea) commences with a bass trombone solo, reminiscent of a shofar call. Alla Marcia (A Desert March) has a sprightly flute and clarinet duet interrupted by trombone signals. Grave (Despair, Hope) and the final Quieto (Silent Prayer, The Promised Land) are infused with beautiful lyricism and Jewish-sounding motifs. It is regrettable that the programmatic subtitles are not included on the back cover of the CD to better understand the composer’s intentions. However, the music has convincing appeal, even without those explanations. The celebrated American flutist, Carol Wincenc performs this work along with Stoltzman, clarinet, Ronald Thomas, cello, and David Taylor, bass trombone.

In all three compositions, Wyner displays his talent as a consummate colorist and orchestrator, achieving unusual timbres and sonorities
from minimal forces.

Wyner was born in Calgary and grew up in New York City, surrounded by his parents’ Yiddish intellectual circle. While studying piano at
the Juilliard School, he became increasingly drawn to composition, which he studied with Paul Hindemith and Richard Donovan at Yale, and with Walter Piston and Randall Thompson at Harvard. The summer following his university graduation, he came to the Simi Valley-based Brandeis Arts Institute under the inspiring direction of Max Helfman. The Arts Institute was part of the Brandeis Camp Institute, founded and headed by Shlomo Bardin. The Arts Institute continued for only five summers, but many of its alumni have had distinguished careers in Jewish music, alumni such as Charles Feldman, Music Director of the Wilshire Blvd. Temple in Los Angeles, Cantor Sheldon Merel, Cantor Emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel in San Diego, and Yehudi Wyner. Brandeis Camp Institute was later renamed the Brandeis-Bardin Institute and is now part of the American
Jewish University, having merged with the University of Judaism to form the new entity.

Wyner’s illustrious career includes winning the Rome Prize in 1953, resulting in three years at the American Academy in Rome. Other
honors included two Guggenheim Fellowships and commissions from the Koussevitsky and Ford Foundations, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, an award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for his lifetime contributions, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His teaching career encompasses being dean of music at the Purchase campus of the State University of New York;   fourteen years as head of the composition faculty at Yale, and, from 1986 until his recent retirement, composition professor at Brandeis University. From 1975 until 1997, he served on the chamber music faculty of the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood. In addition to his composing, Wyner is a gifted pianist and conductor, serving as maestro of the Bach Aria Group since 1968 and directing two opera companies and many chamber ensembles. He is also the leading interpreter of his father’s Yiddish lieder, performing and recording Lazar Weiner’s songs, such as on the Milken Archive CD. The apple has not fallen far from the tree.

This past Father’s Day, the Milken Archives promoted the two recordings by father and son as fitting gifts for that special day, recordings of Jewish music by Lazar Weiner and by his son, one of America’s great composers, Yehudi Wyner .

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Wingard is a retired violinist with the San Diego Symphony and a freelance writer. She may be contacted at eileen.wingard@sdjewishworld.com