Piano Sonata "HaTzmichah"
- Shavua (in memory of the Shoah)
- Galut
- Ge'ulah (variations on Salomon Sulzer's Ein Kamocha)
- Awards
- 2nd Prize in the Arts category of the 2010 University of Southern California Undergraduate Symposium
- Completed
- 2008
- Instrumentation
- Solo Piano
- Duration
- 15'
- Recordings
- Premiere performance by Lawrence Escamilla at the Spring 2009 USC Composition Showcase
- I. Shavua
- II. Galut
- III. Galut
- Sheet Music
- Program Notes
"HaTzmichah" is Hebrew for "The Flowering". The piano sonata is a comment on life's day-to-day catharsis, the memory of hardship and the transition from insanity to jubilation. The movements evoke a journey through past, present, and finally future, from pain to triumph. The music is above all abstract: if the program does not speak to you, the program is not important. The subtitle refers specifically to the religious Zionist vision of Israel, as summarized in Rav Isaac Kook's famous phrase "Reishit tzmichat ge'ulateinu" — the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.
Passing near the former SS headquarters in Vienna inspired me to write the first movement, Shavua. "Shavua" means week. The movement attempts to cope with the Holocaust through the premise that even in an environment of utter despair, life retains its ups and downs, its mundanities. A haze of amorphous grief and tonality gives way briefly to the impression of a death march, but shortly overtakes the march again.
Galut, exile, refers to the 2000 years of Jewish exile from the Land of Israel, after the destruction of the second temple. This middle movement, however, deals specifically with the post-1948 continued exile of Jews living in America. Motives from the first movement are transformed by hints of the final movement's theme into a timeless sounding melody, which finds itself pitted repeatedly against uncomfortable and eccentric musical environments. This tension conjures some of competing pain and allure of exilic life. Ultimately the movement's hectic grit can resolve only by ascending into light, leading to the next movement.
The last movement, Ge'ulah, Redemption, reworks a commonplace Jewish liturgical melody ("There is none like you among the gods that are worshipped, O God, and none like your works! King of kings in every land, ruler of every age: God reigns; God reigned; God will reign for all eternity!") into an anthem of post-Messianic Israel, expressing hope for the exile's end. Variations of increasing complexity and escalating dissonance continue the harmonic logic gradually established in the previous movements. One gets the impression that the Messiah will bring not the solutions to every problem, but rather a ray of holiness and hope. Tension builds into an ecstatic finale.