2 min read
By Denise George and Josh Aronson
Penguin Random House, £19.99
Six months ago, when a double-bass player from Aleppo formed an orchestra of Syrian exiles in the heart of Germany, it was hard not to be reminded of the extraordinary origins of the future Israel Philharmonic, a band of German exiles drawn from the heart of darkness.
The founding circumstances could hardly have been tougher. Rehearsing in heat and dust, or beneath a tin roof in pounding rain, the players followed the vision of a Polish violinist, Bronislaw Huberman, who said: "From my point of view, the catastrophe in Germany has created the best conditions for the founding of a fine orchestra."
An international soloist with influential friends - Albert Einstein opened American doors to his fundraising efforts - Huberman needed more than money and washed-up musicians to create a first-rate ensemble. He recruited key players from Budapest, Rome, Warsaw and the US and, in 1936, convinced Arturo Toscanini, the most famous living conductor and an outspoken anti-fascist, to direct the inaugural concerts. Despite fears for his safety in the thick of an Arab intifada, Toscanini embraced the enterprise with undisguised enthusiasm.
He knew many of the players of old and was thrilled by the potential audience. Stopping for shelter with Huberman in the dining hall of a new kibbutz, Toscanini was besieged by Hitler refugees in farm clothes, demanding to know which tempi he adopted in the finale of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, and why. "Amazing country," he exclaimed to Huberman. "Even the peasants here know music."
You won't find this story in the book under review - it was recounted to me by an eye-witness - nor will you learn much about the personalities of the original Philharmonic musicians, who included two members of the renowned Galimir Quartet, a principal flute from the Chicago Symphony and the effervescent Viennese violinist Dea Gombrich, the art historian's sister, who wound up marrying the director of the British Museum, Sir John Fosdyke. The Palestine Symphony was an orchestra of great characters rather than immaculate perfectionism, a trait that endures in the modern Israel Philharmonic.
The book, founded on a documentary film, is over-dependent on dialogue and reminiscence, real and reconstructed. We learn, for instance, that Johannes Brahms "waits impatiently" to hear the child Huberman, "checks his pocket watch, taps his fingers on the arm rest and thinks back to his own early beginnings in his hometown of Hamburg".
The present-tense writing soon palls. We are invited to imagine what Hitler is thinking and how "Huberman the musician-statesman becomes Huberman the warrior." For all the research that informs this project, it reads like a didactic children's tale.
The real drama, how an orchestra is formed out of one man's sense of mission, is lost in the telling. At their opening concert in December 1936, the Palestine Orchestra played selections from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, banned in Germany. In 2015, the Syrian orchestra of Germany played Mendelssohn's Homecoming from Abroad. The pain of exile persists.
Norman Lebrecht is an author and cultural commentator
