United States Prokofiev, Ben-Haim, Tchaikovsky: Pinchas Zukerman (violin), Israel Philharmonic Orchestra / Lahav Shani (conductor). Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, New York, 15.10.2025. (ES-S)
Prokofiev – Overture on Hebrew Themes
Ben-Haim – Violin Concerto; ‘Berceuse sfaradite’ (encore)
Tchaikovsky – Symphony No.4; ‘Russian Dance’ from The Nutcracker (encore)
Returning to Carnegie Hall for a multi-performance series after an eight-year hiatus, the Israel Philharmonic, under its young music director Lahav Shani, presented New York audiences with programs pairing Tchaikovsky’s last three symphonies with orchestral works by the Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim.
The first of these concerts, featuring Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, Ben-Haim’s Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, traced an intricate cultural map triangulated between Russian Romanticism, Central-European late-Romantic tradition and Jewish folklore. What emerged was less a contrast of idioms than a dialogue across generations, revealing how common melodic and emotional archetypes persist even as they migrate through time and geography.
Ben-Haim’s Violin Concerto (1947, rev.1960) should have formed the program’s emotional and cultural axis. Its inclusion was not only symbolic but historic, marking the work’s first performance at Carnegie Hall – a belated arrival for a concerto still absent from the mainstream repertoire. With Pinchas Zukerman as soloist, the performance carried a special resonance: an artist long associated with the Israel Philharmonic giving voice to one of Israel’s foundational composers. Zukerman’s tone, burnished and unhurried, shaped the music less as a vehicle for bravura than as an extended song. Under Lahav Shani’s attentive direction, the orchestra projected warmth and clarity, allowing Ben-Haim’s modal inflections and supple rhythms to breathe. In the cadenza, Zukerman shaped the line with an almost improvisatory freedom, the introspective tone reinforcing the music’s avoidance of sheer virtuosity. Yet the concerto itself remains emotionally reticent – melodious but curiously static, its gestures polished rather than urgent, its rhetoric more decorative than compelling. For all its craftsmanship, the score never quite sustains the dramatic tension needed to fully engage the listener. Nevertheless, the result still represented a testament to the dialogue between exile and belonging, memory and reinvention, which runs through much of twentieth-century Jewish art.
As an encore, Zukerman offered the composer’s ‘Berceuse sfaradite’ (‘Sephardic Lullaby’), a work whose quiet intimacy seemed to condense his entire style into miniature. Its modal inflections and soft oscillations, drawn from Sephardic song, unfolded with unforced warmth – a brief, inward turn that revealed the lyrical core of Ben-Haim’s voice.
If Ben-Haim’s music embodied a cultural overlap, Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes stood at the opposite pole – a Russian modernist’s stylized encounter with Jewish folklore, translated into the crisp vocabulary of his early neoclassicism. Originally conceived for an émigré ensemble he encountered in New York, the orchestral version heard here transforms klezmer melody and rhythm into something taut and urbane, translating its dance impulses into a more formal expressive frame. The clarinet line, by turns plaintive and sardonic, evokes a world already vanishing, refracted through Prokofiev’s irony. Yet in this performance, its delivery was a touch too contained, blunting the music’s klezmer bite. Shani shaped the overture with a light touch, letting the phrasing breathe rather than caricaturing its folk inflections. As a group, the Israel Philharmonic’s woodwinds brought charm and agility, while the strings offered a warm undercurrent that hinted at nostalgia more than parody. Heard before Ben-Haim, Prokofiev’s stylized encounter with the Jewish musical idiom seemed both distant and foreboding – a detached reflection on what his successor would later make personal.
After the interval, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4 – by far the most recognizable score on the program – reclaimed the emotional source of the evening’s journey: the Romantic ideal that both Prokofiev and Ben-Haim, from their distinct Russian and Central-European vantage points, would each reinterpret and paraphrase in their own idioms. The rendition testified to the cohesion the ensemble has attained under Shani, the strings playing with particular richness and flexibility. He approached the score with structural clarity and unforced dramatic pacing, resisting excess in favor of long-breathed continuity.
The opening fanfare, weighty yet unsentimental, established fate not only as motif but as architectural principle. In the ensuing movements, his control of balance and phrasing drew attention to the symphony’s contrapuntal intricacies rather than its rhetoric. The Andantino unfolded with lyrical patience, the Israel Philharmonic’s strings cultivating a dark warmth that linked naturally to the sonorities previously heard in Ben-Haim’s concerto, while the Scherzo’s pizzicatos had an almost balletic poise. In the Finale, his pacing preserved the music’s exuberance without tipping into bombast; its energy remained taut, its brilliance transparent. The performance conveyed Tchaikovsky’s emotional candor through discipline, not abandon – a reading that closed the program’s cross-cultural arc with coherence and dignity. The ebullience of the last bars was heightened by the encore, the ‘Russian Dance’ from The Nutcracker, offered with verve and precision.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: Lahav Shani conducts the Israel Philharmonic © Stephanie Berger