The many voices of the clarinet

The pictures from Ukraine fill her with great concern. And bring back painful memories. “My parents are Shoah survivors from eastern Poland near present-day Ternopil. I was there,” says Ella Milch-Sheriff on the phone. The Israeli composer, who was born in Haifa, set the traumatic family history of her father, who had to witness the horrific death of his three-year-old son and his first wife and later never spoke about it, in the chamber opera “Baruch’s Silence”, which premiered in Braunschweig in 2010. It was an attempt to lift the unspeakable suffering out of the flow of time and translate it into their language: music.

Today, Ella Milch-Sheriff is one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers and attracts audiences all over the world. This is not a matter of course, because contemporary works are often perceived as too cerebral, too bulky. Her music, on the other hand, is more intuitive than intellectual. It has harmony, melody and rhythms. And it shows the full range of human emotions.

Loss and deep sadness also weave through her new clarinet quartet as motifs, which will be premiered on April 6, the penultimate day of “intonations”. The piece, commissioned by Elena Bashkirova and the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival, was actually supposed to be performed in the glass courtyard of the Jewish Museum as early as 2020. But then Corona came – and the world stood still. Since then, the premiere has been postponed four times, and the 2021 festival in Jerusalem has also been canceled.

Yiddish folk meets jazz

Ella Milch-Sheriff is now looking forward to finally hearing her work live in Berlin. She composed it for three strings and a clarinet, which for her “has something very special”. “It’s a well-known jazz instrument and is used in traditional Jewish klezmer music.” Because it has three different registers, it combines three instruments in one. It can sometimes be dark and mysterious, sometimes clear and loud. This makes it one of the most emotionally expressive instruments and opens up a lot of creative scope for composers. “That’s why I love her,” enthuses the composer.

This versatility already comes into play in the prologue of the clarinet quartet. Yiddish folklore meets occidental and Middle Eastern sounds. Ella Milch-Sheriff, who enjoyed a western musical upbringing, draws on unlimited resources. After all, Israel is a melting pot of cultures and influences.

Exciting interplay also runs through the three following movements. It starts with a hunt. But what? What for? That remains unclear. And yet, after two years of the pandemic, this breathlessness takes on an almost allegorical meaning. Particularly poignant is the second movement, dedicated to her late husband and composer Noam Sheriff and inspired by a rare Kaddish melody, a Jewish funeral prayer.

At the end it gets lively and jazzy. Life is fragile, sometimes painful, but it goes on, is the message. Ella Milch-Sheriff doesn’t stop either. She is already working on a new opera commissioned by Omer Meir Wellber. The Israeli conductor will be music director of the Vienna Volksoper from September. She is not yet allowed to reveal any details, says the composer. Just this much: the libretto is phenomenal.