COMING HOME TO THE ISRAEL PHIL
The Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) lives in my blood. Not metaphorically. This sentiment springs from actual circumstance—a birth story twined around orchestral strings like umbilical cord.
On December 6, 1966—that annus mirabilis—my mother was in her 8th month with me in Tel Aviv’s main concert hall while the Israel Philharmonic tuned their instruments. On stage stood the century’s greatest cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich himself, with Zubin Mehta raising his baton to conjure Shostakovich.
My father, music-mad and starry-eyed, couldn’t bear the thought of missing Rostropovich in the flesh. Fate had other plans. Two minutes into the Cello Concerto #1, as Rostropovich’s bow bit into the opening theme, my mother’s waters broke with dramatic timing. The amniotic announcement spread across concert hall carpet like a tide coming in.
My mother loved telling this story. “We left,” she’d say with characteristic understatement, “with a trail behind us.” Her fluid offering to the cultural gods. I take comfort knowing Mann Auditorium’s carpets have been replaced several times since then. My embryonic signature no longer clings to those fibers, though the music that triggered my arrival still reverberates in my cells.
The IPO’s history is a microcosm of the 20th century. Founded in 1936 by Bronislaw Huberman as the Palestine Orchestra, it was less an artistic venture than a rescue mission. Those early musicians didn’t just bring their instruments; they carried an entire musical tradition across borders.
After Israel’s birth in 1948, the orchestra’s name changed while its sonic DNA retained that distinctive mitteleuropean warmth, nurtured through the decades by Toscanini, Bernstein, and Mehta’s steady hands.
Israel Philharmonic
Lahav Shani, just thirty-six, steps into big shoes as the orchestra’s first Israeli-born music director. His arrival in 2020, following Mehta’s nearly fifty-year tenure, doesn’t feel like a sharp break—more like the next verse in a long melody. Before he ever picked up a baton, Shani was a pianist and double bassist, and you can tell. Validated at Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa last night, he leads like someone who knows what it feels like to be inside the music, not just on top of it. He listens with the focus of a chamber player, tracking the conversation between the lines. There’s no grandstanding in his movements. He keeps things direct, almost transparent. Sometimes, he ditches the baton entirely, shaping sound with his hands like he’s working with clay.
Zvi Avni’s Prayer for string orchestra opened the program—the last of a five-city U.S. tour—a piece rarely heard outside Israel. Born in Germany in 1927, Avni fled to Israel (then called Palestine) as a child and developed a musical style that blends Western techniques with Middle Eastern sonorities—without resorting to exoticism. The piece was written in honor of Avni’s father, who was killed during the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt.
Shani drew from the strings a sound both unified and individual—that rare state where separate voices retain distinct colors while merging into a single breathing entity. The work’s microtonal shadings emerged not as exotic spices but as natural extensions of expression. Most striking was Shani’s architectural vision—tension built through static textures until reaching a suspended collective utterance, then dissolving back into silence.
Lahav Shani and Haran Meltzer, cello
Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei followed. Principal cellist Haran Meltzer’s tone glowed amber in the hall, but it was the fresh perspective that caught the ear. Publicity materials often misidentify Bruch as Jewish. He wasn’t. Protestant to his bones, with no Jewish ancestry, he tried repeatedly to correct this error in his lifetime. This fact doesn’t diminish the work—it magnifies music’s border-crossing power. A German Protestant found profound expression through Ashkenazic prayer melodies. That tells us something worth remembering.
The soloist stripped away the sentimental varnish that often suffocates this work. Phrases breathed with dignity instead of heaving with emotion. The melodic line unfolded not as cantorial mimicry but as universal lament. Shani’s accompaniment achieved glass-like clarity, with string tremolos creating just enough air for the cello to speak without shouting. The shift to the major-key second theme brought sudden light into the room without banishing necessary shadows.
Guy Eshed, flute
Bernstein’s Halil (“flute” in Hebrew) sat right in the heart of the program—and it belonged there. Bernstein’s connection to the Israel Philharmonic ran deep, as principal guest conductor for life. The piece itself carries heavy weight. It’s a tribute to Yadin Tanenbaum, a young flutist killed in the Yom Kippur War, but it stretches far beyond a simple memorial. Grief runs through it, yes, but so does unrest, tension, a kind of musical unease that doesn’t let up.
The composer blurs lines—between personal and political, between harmony and noise. You’ll catch flashes of his familiar musical DNA: jagged rhythms, brief melodic phrases that almost feel like West Side Story in a hall of mirrors. Then they vanish into chaos. Dissonance crashes in. Atonality creeps along the edges. It’s a broken sound world, and that feels deliberate.
Bernstein called it a Nocturne, though it doesn’t behave like one. There’s nothing lullaby-like here. No soft glow. Instead, it pulses with unease. Moments of calm keep slipping through your fingers. Ghostly voices rise, then disappear. Violence flares up in the middle of silence. It is one of Bernstein’s least accessible works. When the legendary Jean-Pierre Rampal premiered it, the challenge was clear: this wasn’t about beauty. This was about something harder to face.
Guest Israeli flutist Guy Eshed made Halil’s brutal technical demands seem casual, though keen ears detected the fierce control behind such precisely calibrated shadings. Shani handled Bernstein’s trademark textural collisions with surgical precision. The percussion section maintained clock-like accuracy while preserving the score’s improvisational spirit—no small feat.
Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony capped the evening. This most naked of his orchestral confessions. We can’t hear the Pathétique now without biographical ghosts in the room—its premiere days before his death (cholera claimed him, not suicide, despite persistent myths), his life as semi-closeted homosexual in Imperial Russia, and his unfortunate participation in the antisemitism that permeated Russian society of his era.
Lahav Shani (photo courtesy Kirshbaum & Associates)
Great performances acknowledge these shadows while focusing on architectural truth. Shani achieved this balance, treating the symphony not as diary entry but as sound-cathedral whose emotional power springs from structural genius.
The first movement unfolded with startling lucidity. Bassoon and string bass lines emerged from the texture with unusual clarity, creating a foundation of dark solidity. Climaxes arrived with natural force rather than imposed drama, each fortissimo the logical outcome of what came before.
The 5/4 second movement—Tchaikovsky’s elegant solution to the problem of what follows sonata form—maintained its strange balance between grace and asymmetry. Shani let the melodic line float above the meter without losing structural backbone.
The march-like third movement built toward its conclusion like a gathering storm. The brass section combined muscle and finesse in the triumphant passages.
For the Adagio lamentoso, Shani chose tempi slightly quicker than funeral pace, allowing phrases to sing even at whisper volume. The string section produced that sound unique to orchestras with Central European ancestry—richness born not from uniform vibrato but from thoughtful bow weight and distribution.
Most revealing was the symphony’s final descent, where falling bass lines gradually extinguish into silence. Shani resisted the temptation to stretch these measures like taffy. He maintained the movement’s pulse, letting the music’s inherent gravity register without exaggeration. The effect cut deeper precisely because it avoided obvious heart-tugging.
Shani held silence for thirty seconds after the final note—not as theatrical gesture but as necessary space, allowing the sound’s absence to complete its meaning. In that suspended moment, the evening’s journey came full circle: from Avni’s communal prayer through Bruch’s adapted liturgy and Bernstein’s memorial to Tchaikovsky’s private resignation.
As an encore, the orchestra played the solemn Elgar’s “Nimrod,” the ninth and best-known section from his Enigma Variations, continuing the somber mood of the evening. Since Israel is at war, there was no feel-good encore.
The Israel Philharmonic is woven into my own story—its music the first sound I ever knew, its echoes still vibrating in my cells. That same continuity defines Lahav Shani’s leadership. Born into an Israel where the IPO was already an institution, he now carries its legacy forward, blending its European roots with a distinctly Israeli sensibility. Under his baton, the orchestra is not just preserving history but shaping new generations—just as it did for me before I had even drawn my first breath.
production photos Philharmonic Society of Orange County / Drew A. Kelley
Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
part of 5-city national tour
Segerstrom Concert Hall, March 26, 2025
presented by Philharmonic Society of Orange County
Lahav Shani, conductor/music director
Tzvi AVNI: Prayer for String Orchestra
BRUCH: Kol Nidrei, Op. 47
BERNSTEIN: Halil, Nocturne
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique”
