Opinion
In praise of Noam Sheriff, the composer who was an Israeli trailblazer
Norman Lebrecht pays tribute to the first local-born composer to have work performed by the Israel Philharmonic
August 30, 2018 15:01
1 min read
Norman Lebrecht pays tribute to the first local-born composer to have work performed by the Israel Philharmonic
August 30, 2018 15:01Noam Sheriff was so powerful a trailblazer in Israeli music that David Ben Gurion would greet him as “Mr Bloch”, believing this to be a generic name for a Jewish composer.
Noam, who died last weekend at 83, was the first local-born composer to have work performed by the Israel Philharmonic, the first to be acclaimed at the Salzburg Festival and the first to write in an idiom that was unaffectedly Israeli. He touched on every level of music making and the grief at his passing has been overwhelming.
Noam acquired craft essentials from Paul Ben Haim, a Munich refugee who allied Hindemith-like rigour with indigenous Middle Eastern sound. In the early 1950s, Noam went to Berlin where the composer Boris Blacher took him in as a house guest and trained him to be a respectable
German artist. Fluent in German but never feeling he belonged, Noam went home to hack out a musical living in the stony quarries of a new society.
Aside from composing, he was a gifted conductor — first of Tizmoret Tsahal and later of an orchestra he created in Rishon Lezion and toured around Europe. I once heard the players ask him in an interval what they would give as an encore. “Havenu shalom Aleichem,” twinkled Noam, a coded reference to a theme in Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony. He staged two Mahler festivals in Tel Aviv, earning me a death threat in an overheated discussion of Mahler’s Jewish origins.
He was a phenomenal teacher who could find Torah tropes in Gershwin and atonality in Israeli pop songs, some of which he wrote himself. Two generations of composers owe him all they know, among them his wife Ella whose daring opera on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger was premiered in Germany early this year.
Noam’s oratorios on the Holocaust and the Spanish expulsion have been widely performed and should be heard wider still. His concerto for klezmer clarinet is a hoot and he was constantly working on something new, his door forever open to everyone.
We were friends for quarter of a century, the kind of friends who finish each other’s sentences even if we last spoke a year before, shooting puns in three languages on a breeze that was forever mild. I once punted him an idea. He called me next day to say, “The prime minister likes it.”
That was Noam: he knew everyone by first name, from the president to the Palestinian grocery boy. Irreplaceable and irresistible, I will find space in next month’s Israeli music festival to pass on his flame.
Norman Lebrecht is a commentator on music and cultural affairs
