JCC Chamber Music Society Presents Final Concert of the 2010-2011 Season, 3/5

On Saturday, March 5 at 8 p.m., the JCC Thurnauer School of Music will present the Thurnauer Chamber Music Society in its final concert of the season, Mostly Hebraic and All Soulful, a program that explores the many facets of music with a Jewish theme.

Highlighting the evening will be the evocative Kol Nidre for cello and piano by Max Bruch, a suite from Bock and Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof and Paul Schoenfield's Café Music for Piano Trio, composed in 1986. The concert will be held in the Eric Brown Theatre, the intimate recital hall at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly, N.J. A pre-concert talk about the music starts at 7 pm. Tickets, at $16 for JCC members and $20 for non-members, or by calling 201-408-1465.

The Bruch work comes from the Kol Nidre prayer, recited during the evening service on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and the holiest time of the year. In Bruch's setting of the melody, the cello imitates the rhapsodic voice of the cantor chanting the liturgy in the
synagogue. Although Sergei Prokofiev was not Jewish, he composed his Overture on Hebrew Themes on commission from a chamber ensemble that was giving performances to raise funds to establish a music conservatory in Jerusalem.

The Fiddler suite was arranged by Sidney Goldsmith, father of one of the members of the Thurnauer Chamber Music Society, clarinetist Richard Goldsmith. Other pieces on the program are Joseph Achron's Hebrew Melody for violin and piano, Op. 33, and Three Hebrew Melodies for Clarinet and Piano, arranged by Simeon Bellison, a virtuoso clarinetist in the early part of the last century.

The members of the Thurnauer Chamber Music Society are Sharon Roffman and Annaliesa Place, violins; Yari Bond, cello; Richard Goldsmith, clarinet; Jon Klibonoff, piano; and guest artist Kyle Armbrust, viola - are all distinguished musicians in their own right.