Jewish links abound in music – as a gentile I can observe rather than feel this from the outside, as it were, but as a pianist I feel it deeply. You can't help but do so. The whole so-called ''Golden Age of Pianism'' – that amazing school of pianists that encompassed astonishing virtuosos like Joseph Hoffman, through to Vladimir Horowitz and Shura Cherkassky - is quite Jewish-owned. How do you define that? Well, in that case it's about virtuosity of course but something more; it's about exploring the keyboard for sound and for colour for their own sakes, and in a sensuous way seeking to do nothing else but to give pleasure to the pianist and to the audience. That's something that is rather lost today.
Being invited to play at the International Concerts Series at Central Synagogue has been a fascinating journey for me. We've called our programme "You don't have to be Jewish" which is about a way of listening to Jewishness in music. So we have some non-Jewish composers who were influenced by Jews, such as Debussy and Sir Arthur Bliss, both of whom had Jewish wives. Then we turn that on its head for once-hugely-famous Jewish musical figures whose music is largely forgotten – Mario Castelnuovo-Tadesco, Harriet Cohen and 'golden age' master Felix Blumenfeld. And just for fun, a famous and famously Jewish composer – George Gershwin.
As a non-Jew I suppose I'm closest to Debussy and Bliss in this little story. Arthur Bliss in the 1920s met and married Gertrude Hoffman and it was she who introduced him to the American scene. In particular, she had a passion for the emergence of motion pictures and introduced the young Arthur to this when he was in the States. It caught fire in his musical imagination and infused much of his work. The four short pieces in our concert are called Masks – and each sounds like soundtracks to four separate films, one a kind of Charlie Chaplin parody, another very romantic and so on. Hollywood and cinema were of course shaped by Jews. And Hoffman was important to Bliss in another way – she lived to 104, dying as recently as 2008, and it was she who tirelessly promoted his music. She certainly had a Jewish kind of thrust and drive (he was more of a reticent English gent). Without her Bliss would not have been Bliss, and neither might we know about him.
Harriet Cohen was another important Jewish lady of the English music world, to put it mildly. She was one of the most fascinating female pianists working in this country, especially in London, during a period in British music history which saw the emergence of a great stream of British composers – Bliss, Bax, Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and others. Virtually every British composer or note wrote for her or arranged their music for her (because she had small hands). She had a pervasive influence on the evolution of British music. Arnold Bax, one of the most important composers for piano of the last century, had a scandalous affair with her – the music world's worst-kept secret - and regarded her as his muse. He attributed the late-romantic opulence in his music to his ongoing fascination with her.
A kind of English Alma Mahler, the music world here in some ways revolved around Harriet Cohen. And not only music – she got very involved both in anti-Nazi activities and the drive for a Jewish homeland. We're premiering four miniatures, world premieres, by her in this concert – the last of which is very Jewish-inflected. She tragically cut her wrists, finishing her two-handed playing career, and nobody knows whether it was an accident or a reaction to the news that Bax slept with other women. Romanticism attended her to the end.
And then we have Castelnuovo-Tadesco, a Jewish composer who wrote a huge amount for Jewish-run Hollywood, though mostly anonymously – so much of his music is familiar but not his name. At his best he was like an Italian version of Debussy at his most exuberant. And he never lost touch with his Jewishness, it's clearly there in much of the music.
But Gershwin stands apart. Why? Well, where Castelnuovo-Tadesco is inconsistent – some of his film music is accomplished but a bit unindividual (you often find that with film composers, working to a director's cues), with Gershwin we're not talking just about fantastic gifts – we're talking genius. You can always hear it's him and you can always hear exactly what he's about – Jewishness, yes, but also a sense of what it must have been like to have been in New York of that period, and it sounds as vibrant and relevant and alive today as it must have sounded then.
How to define Jewishness in music? Not for me to say, but I know it when I hear it, and I hear it often. And for that, truly, you don't have to be Jewish.
