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Strikingly Individual
KEITH BRAMICH finds the music of Moses Pergament haunting, strange and sad
'All the performances here are excellent.'
Moses Pergament is not a name that springs readily to mind in today's classical music world, but many post-World War II European Jewish folk were very familiar with his song cycle, Den judiska sången ('The Jewish Song') for soloists, choir and orchestra. Steeped in Yiddish culture, it sets Jewish poems and also words by the Swedish writer Ragnar Josephson (1891-1966) to portray the Jewish people as strong and free, worlds apart from the hateful nationalistic view of the Third Reich or indeed the equally worrying events of today's Middle East.
Pergament was born in 1893 into a very musical Orthodox Lithuanian Jewish family in Helsinki, during Finland's Russian period. His studies included periods in St Petersburg, Stockholm and Berlin, he moved to Sweden in 1915, became a Swedish citizen in 1918, worked for a while as a conductor in Berlin, wrote musical criticism for a Swedish daily newspaper, very gradually began to get commissions to compose, and died in Stockholm in 1977, aged eighty-three.
In his long, detailed and fascinating notes accompanying Toccata Classics' new CD, Moses Pergament Volume One - A Musical Miscellany, Swedish pianist Martin Malmgren, based here in Finland, and the general producer of this recording, argues in depth that jealousy, anti-semitism and Pergament's mixed-race 'outsider' background were all responsible for his being generally ignored and forgotten as a composer. Maybe this album will help to redress that?
Pergament's strikingly individual style is most obvious to me from the very start of the last work on this disc, the rather brooding ten-minute late work, Ciélo e térra ('Heaven and earth'), a 'fantasia differente' for cello and string nonet written in 1969, played here by Tomas Nuñez and members of the Helsinki Chamber Orchestra, created in 2018 and led here by Finnish-American conductor Aku Sorensen. Malmgren suggests that this work is a meditation on the subject of death and the composer's conflicting views on religion.
Listen — Moses Pergament: Ciélo e térra
(TOCC0728 track 20, 0:00-0:59) ℗ 2024 Toccata Classics :
The album begins with the only other orchestral work here - Pergament's rather austere 1951-2 Piano Concerto, with Martin Malmgren as soloist and the Helsinki Metropolitan Orchestra conducted by Sasha Mäkilä, an up-and-coming Finnish conductor who has been this group's artistic director since its inception in 2017. The bold first movement, marked Maestoso, is followed by a rather beautiful, lost and drifting, often brittle-sounding but dramatic Molto adagio.
Listen — Moses Pergament: Molto adagio (Piano Concerto)
(TOCC0728 track 2, 3:07-4:05) ℗ 2024 Toccata Classics :
The dramatic, insistent final movement, Allegretto grazioso, feels to me like a scherzo, especially near the start, although that austere feeling is still there. Malmgren's notes tell a different story - that of a concerto grosso in rondo form based on a Jewish theme.
Listen — Moses Pergament: Allegretto grazioso (Piano Concerto)
(TOCC0728 track 3, 0:00-0:57) ℗ 2024 Toccata Classics :
This disc features works from throughout the composer's life, and, apart from the Piano Concerto, which appears first, the rest of the programme consists of piano and chamber music presented roughly in increasing date order. Martin Malmgren plays piano for almost all the works on this album. The earliest music, the rather Romantic Sorrow, Op 5, written in 1908-9 when Pergament was a teenager, sounds, not surprisingly, as if it was written by a different person.
Listen — Moses Pergament: Sorrow Op 5)
(TOCC0728 track 4, 0:00-0:39) ℗ 2024 Toccata Classics :
Following three Lyrical Dances for piano comes another piano piece from 1915 - the powerful Sulamith's Dance from Pergament's incidental music to Gertrud Paloheimo's play King Solomon, and then there's a chamber music version of his Chanson triste, again from 1915. Martin Malmgren is joined here by musicians from the Agora Music Collective - Sebastian Silén, violin, Lea Tuuri, obbligato violin and Mathias Hortling, cello.
Listen — Moses Pergament: Chanson triste
(TOCC0728 track 9, 0:00-0:53) ℗ 2024 Toccata Classics :
We then skip over twenty years into the 1930s for two poignant pieces from the incidental music from The Feast of Esther (1936) and, from three years later, three light excerpts from the score written for Alf Sjöberg's bizarre World War II film They Staked their Lives, all for piano.
Listen — Moses Pergament: Valse lente (They Staked their Lives Act III)
(TOCC0728 track 14, 0:00-0:59) ℗ 2024 Toccata Classics :
Another skip forward to 1961 and Festive Fanfare, transcribed by the composer for piano, brings us into the sixties and seventies - the last decades of Pergament's life. For Nicole - Pergament's granddaughter - is for piano alone, Meditation for cello is a solo, and then two works for cello (Tomas Nuñez) and piano - another Meditation (1969) and Melodia romantica (1970).
Listen — Moses Pergament: Melodia romantica
(TOCC0728 track 19, 1:56-2:53) ℗ 2024 Toccata Classics :
There's a haunting strangeness and a sadness to much of this music, and Moses Pergament's compositional voice is definitely one to experience. All the performances here are excellent. Martin Malmgren's extensive liner notes, as already mentioned, are fascinating and detailed, as is an accompanying essay by Swedish music professor Henrik Rosengren.
Copyright © 25 October 2024
Keith Bramich,
Helsinki, Finland
