Daniel Shalit, one of the leading contemporary Israeli composers, was born in 1940. He studied piano, French horn, composition and conducting at the Israel Academy of Music in Tel-Aviv, and later at the Guildhall School of Music in London. Returning to Israel in 1962, he joined the Israel Chamber Ensemble, working as a harpsichordist and later as associate conductor. For a time, he taught musical theory, musicology and philosophy at Tel-Aviv University, but now devotes himself mainly to teaching Jewish philosophy as well as writing several books on Judaism and its relationship with contemporary culture.

Shalit’s compositional output includes music for piano solo, voice and piano, chamber ensemble and orchestra. Of the two works featured here, Resisey laila (Out of the dark) for symphony orchestra is the most recent, having been composed in 1997. On initial acquaintance, this ten-minute composition, whose emotional trajectory moves inexorably from the depths of despair to a mood of defiance, conveys an almost improvisatory feeling. Undoubtedly, part of this impression comes from the rhythmic fluidity and apparent spontaneity of Shalit’s musical material. Yet in fact, the composer exerts a tight grip on the structure of the work, casting it in the form of a theme and four variations.

The theme is heard at the outset in an ominous-sounding fragmentary recitative for unaccompanied solo horn, characterised by ornamentation and recurring grace notes with a strong emphasis on the intervals of a minor third and a flattened seventh. According to the composer, the theme is in fact an original Chassidic melody—a haunting chant which was sung to him by Rabbi Eli Rivkin, a gifted Chassid in Kfar-Habad (Habad Chassidic Village), Israel. Shalit added that Eli Rivkin 'was the only one of his whole family to survive the Holocaust, having been sent before World War II at the age of twelve to live with his grandfather in Manchester, England where he learnt hundreds of Chassidic melodies which he then brought over with him to Israel'.

As the recitative melody continues in the horns, Shalit adds new instrumental colours: first, string harmonics which are then followed by the gradual introduction of all woodwind instruments and more horns as the music moves to an emphatic unison climax. In the final bar, the solo horn is left unaccompanied, completing the chant with a downward glissando.

The ensuing variations follow the melodic and expressive trajectory of the theme, each one building up to an equally powerful climax, but reflecting slightly different emotional states. In the first variation, swaying ascending and descending exotic scales in the strings are punctuated by the epic sounds of a piano and gong. Woodwind and brass fanfares enter the fray before the reintroduction of the scalic pattern on the strings.

In a noticeable change of tonal centre, the second variation opens with furtive and increasingly anxious two-note and three-note patterns in the strings followed by ostinato rhythms in the piano and woodwind and a lamenting clarinet solo. After this comes a more mysterious sounding passage scored for divided strings and pizzicato bass, before the eruption of another frenzied wind and brass climax over tremolando strings. At the end of the variation, the two and three-note patterns return to lead us directly into the third variation. Here a muted solo violin takes up the intervallic characteristics of the Chassidic chant, transforming them into a klezmer-like dance that becomes increasingly animated as the rest of the orchestra takes over the theme. The sinister string harmonics, heard at the opening, then return, the rest of the orchestra joining in on a sustained unison D that, like the famous passage near the end of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, gets louder and louder. The opening horn chant returns in the fourth and final variation alternating with percussive rhythms on the timpani with increasing emphasis on the interval of the minor third. The full orchestra then takes up this melodic pattern in unison with ever greater rhythmic insistence, bringing the work to a dramatic conclusion.

from notes by Erik Levi © 2023