Tracks

Track

Time

Play

Ma tovu 03:07
Psalm 29 02:50
L'kha dodi 04:13
Psalm 93 02:04
 

Liner Notes

In the spring of 1943, Cantor David J. Putterman, who served the pulpit of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue—a nationally prominent and religiously centrist congregation affiliated with the Conservative movement—presented his first "Sabbath Eve Service of Liturgical Music by Contemporary Composers." That service offered, as world premieres, the first fruits of his ambitious experiment: the commissioning of well-established as well as promising younger American composers, non-Jews as well as Jews, to write for the American Synagogue and its liturgy. There were some precedents in Europe during the 19th century, notably in Vienna and Paris, for invitations to local Jewish and Christian composers for synagogue settings. Some American synagogues also preceded Putterman in commissioning new music for Jewish worship—in some cases by highly important composers. But Putterman’s project, unlike those occasional or one-time occurrences, was soon designed to function in perpetuity on an annual basis.

Over its decades-long span, Putterman’s Park Avenue Synagogue program sought to encourage serious artists—who were often outside the specifically Jewish liturgical music world—to contribute to Jewish worship, each according to his own stylistic language without imposed conditions. In addition, Putterman’s practical aim was to accumulate an expanding repertoire of sophisticated music suitable for American synagogues, many of whose worshipers were no strangers to contemporary developments in the world of serious cultivated music.

The very first new music service that spring included world premieres of settings by Alexandre Gretchaninoff, Paul Dessau, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Hugo Chaim Adler, and Max Helfman—all commissioned expressly for the occasion—along with other contemporary but preexisting works by accomplished synagogue composers. The experiment proved immediately successful, and Putterman soon organized permanent funding for the annual commissions and premiere performances. The underlying mission was stated in the printed programs furnished for the congregation: “The program is dedicated to the enhancement of Jewish worship; to a wider diffusion and utilization of the resources of Jewish music; and to the encouragement of those who give of their lives and genius to its enrichment.”

Those special Friday evening services of new music soon became not only important occasions for the wider Jewish community, but also eagerly anticipated annual events on New York’s general cultural calendar; and they attracted considerable national attention as well. For the composers mostly associated with the general music arena, the commissions often constituted unique artistic challenges. For those already devoted in some measure to Jewish liturgical expression, the annual commission award became a much coveted honor as well as a prestigious opportunity—almost a “right of passage” in some perceptions. Indeed, by the end of the 20th century, many of the most significant works in the aggregate literature of American synagogue music had been born as Putterman commissions.

Over the years, dozens of successful composers received Putterman commissions and had their music presented at those annual services. The roster includes, among many others, such names as Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, Darius Milhaud, Herman Berlinski, Stefan Wolpe, Alexandre Tansman, David Amram, Robert Starer, Jack Gottlieb, Lazar Weiner, Yehudi Wyner, Miriam Gideon, Marvin David Levy, Leo Smit, Lukas Foss, Jacob Druckman, Leo Sowerby—and David Diamond. Of equal interest from a historical perspective is the list of many of America’s most prized composers who were invited by Putterman but who, for one reason or another, declined: Arnold Schoenberg (who did seriously contemplate the proposition), Samuel Barber, Paul Hindemith, Paul Creston, Walter Piston, Norman Dello Joio, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Bernard Hermann, William Schuman, and Igor Stravinsky—to cite only some.

The first seven annual contemporary music services comprised individual settings of specific prayer texts by a variety of composers. Beginning with the premiere of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Sacred Service for the Sabbath Eve (op. 122) at the 1950 service—and for more than a quarter century afterward, with the exception of special anniversaries or retrospectives—entire musical services as artistically unified works by single composers were commissioned and presented each year.

The 1951 commission went to David Diamond, who had already contributed two settings for previous new music services at Park Avenue. A tightly unified work, the various sections of Mizmor L’david are, as Diamond described, “cyclically related,” with a thematic and structural arch connecting them. “Everything is motivically and structurally connected, with motives and leitmotifs that are transformed. This is a technique that is certainly a result of my wonderful studies with Roger Sessions; and, of course, Boulanger, who was even more remarkable in that sense.” The entire work includes four selections from the kabbalat shabbat (welcoming the Sabbath) service (of which three have been excerpted for this recording), and sixteen settings from the evening service proper (arvit)—as well as three organ pieces: a prelude and two interludes.

The premiere of Mizmor L’david was reviewed in the New York Times by no less prominent a critic than Harold Schonberg—an indication of the legitimacy and wide respect those annual services had come to achieve far beyond Jewish communal confines. “One feels that Diamond strove hard to get at the basic core of his texts,” Schonberg wrote—one of the highest compliments one can pay to any composer who wrestles with the inner meanings of the Hebrew liturgy. The work was repeated in its entirety at the Park Avenue Synagogue for its twenty-second annual new music service, in 1966, in honor of the composer’s fortieth birthday. It was the only occasion there of such an encore of a complete service by a living composer.

By: Neil W. Levin

 

Lyrics

Sung in Hebrew

MA TOVU

How lovely are your dwellings, O House of Israel.
O Lord, through Your abundant kindness I enter Your house and worship You with reverence in Your holy sanctuary.
I love Your presence in this place where Your glory resides.
Here, I bow and worship before the Lord, my maker.
And I pray to You, O Lord, that it shall be Your will to answer me with Your kindness and grace, and with the essence of Your truth that preserves us.

PSALM 29HAVU LADONAI B'NEI ELIM

Ascribe to the Lord, O divine beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory of His name; bow down to the Lord, majestic in holiness.
The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord, over the mighty waters.
The voice of the Lord is power; the voice of the Lord is majesty; the voice of the Lord breaks cedars; the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, Sirion, like a young wild ox.
The voice of the Lord kindles flames of fire; the voice of the Lord convulses the wilderness; the Lord convulses the wilderness of Kadesh; the voice of the Lord causes hinds to calve and strips forests bare; while in His temple all say, “Glory!”
The Lord sat enthroned at the Flood; the Lord sits enthroned, king forever.

May the Lord grant strength to His people; may the Lord bestow on His people well-being.

Translation: JPS Tanakh 1999

L'KHA DODI

REFRAIN:
Beloved, come—let us approach the Sabbath bride and welcome the entrance of our Sabbath, the bride.

STROPHES 2, 5, and 9:

Let us go, indeed hasten to greet the Sabbath,
For she is the source of blessing.
From creation’s primeval beginnings that blessing has flowed.
For on the seventh day—the end of the beginning of creation—
God made His Sabbath.
But He conceived of her on the first of the days—at the beginning of the beginning of creation.

Awaken, awaken!
Your light has come.
Arise and shine, Awake, awake—
Speak a song! Sing a poem!
The glory of the Lord is revealed to you.

Sabbath, you who are your Master’s crown,
Come in peace, in joy, in gladness
Into the midst of the faithful of a remarkably special people.
Come, O Sabbath bride—
Bride, come!

PSALM 93—ADONAI MALAKH

The Lord is king, He is robed in grandeur; the Lord is robed, He is girded with strength.
The world stands firm; it cannot be shaken.
Your throne stands firm from of old; from eternity You have existed.
The ocean sounds, O Lord, the ocean sounds its thunder, the ocean sounds its pounding.
Above the thunder of the mighty waters, more majestic than the breakers of the sea is the Lord, majestic on high.
Your decrees are indeed enduring; holiness befits Your house, O Lord, for all times.

Translation: JPS Tanakh 1999


 

Credits

Composer: David Diamond

Length: 12:16
Genre: Liturgical

Performers: Samuel Adler, Conductor;  Aaron Miller, Organ;  Charles Osborne, Tenor;  Rochester Singers

Date Recorded: 12/01/1993
Venue: Kilbourn Hall/Eastman School of Music (C), University of Rochester, New York
Engineer: Dusman, David
Assistant Engineer: Isaacson, Michael
Project Manager: Isaacson, Michael

Additional Credits:

Publisher: David Diamond
Translation by Rabbi Morton M. Leifman

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