Nigunim

Around the World in Four Movements The meat of the program commenced when Lara St. John stepped in front of the white-clad orchestra. Nigunim is a violin concerto rooted in melodies inspired by Jewish songs from around the world. The piece won the Azrieli Prize in 2018. In a recent interview with Blogcritics the composer told us that in writing it he created new melodies inspired by “listening to music from Jewish communities around the world, recalling music I had heard from different diasporas, and internalizing the styles and gestures. I also analyzed these melodies and found some surprising commonalities.” Photo credit: Oren Hope Media The melodies are certainly evocative of Jewish songs. But Dorman develops them using a musical language all his own. The spectral beginning has a mournful air, the violin speaking first in a thin, keening voice. A klezmer clarinet explodes into the mix, touching off thunder from the orchestra and a sequence of thrilling violin-and-orchestra passages. Right away it was clear that the soloist and the orchestra, as led by Knights co-artistic director Eric Jacobsen, had locked together into the music. They remained perfectly in sync even at its most challenging. avner dorman Avner Dorman Marked “Adagio Religioso,” the opening movement evolves into a dirge alternating between dissonant harmonies and folk song-suggestive motifs. The Scherzo that follows shifts the mood dramatically. A feisty dance rocked by furious pizzicatos, it fuses celestial and macabre elements and includes a barrage of violin fireworks that generated spontaneous applause. The third movement (“Adagio”) draws a pointillistic curtain of sound; then a solemn ringing of bells leads to a gorgeous violin melody couched in modernist harmonics and glassy songplay. This movement flows directly into the finale, a scampering “Presto” dominated by a hurried 7/8 rhythm that rides over muscular groans and anguished chirps. Soloist and orchestra alike negotiated the movement’s complex rhythms brilliantly. The composer, my wife suggested to me afterwards, “was trying to kill the violinist.” If so, no such luck. Lara St. John is a force of nature. After the concerto she dazzled the crowd with a concoction of her own, a tour-de-force dazzler she said she “sort of made up based on some old Oltenian tunes (a province in Romania). I call it: ‘Oltenian Hora.'” It fit right in with the boisterous good feeling a Knights concert routinely creates.

— Jon Sobel , Blog Critics (2022)