Bi-College Chorale to Perform Concert
with Jewish Liturgical, Folklore Themes

On Sunday, April 29, at 3 p.m., the Haverford-Bryn Mawr College Chorale, under the direction of Thomas Lloyd, will perform Andrea Clearfield's "The Golem Psalms" (2006) and Ernest Bloch's "Avodath Hakodesh" (Sacred Service, 1933), with guest soloist Cantor Eliot Vogel, baritone, Temple Har Zion, Narberth. The concert is free and open to the public.

Student soloists, coached by Cantor Vogel, include Sam Rabinowitz HC '09, baritone, Leigh Urbschat HC '08, alto, Susannah Smith '07, alto, Sebastian Moore HC '09, tenor, and Katherine Chiappinelli HC '07, soprano. The concert will be held in Roberts Hall, Marshall Auditorium, on the Haverford College campus and is free and open to the public. For more information call 610-896-1011.

The "Avodath Hakodesh" was the first major concert setting of the Jewish liturgy. Having steeped himself in Jewish music and liturgy only as an adult, Ernest Bloch sought to create a work with a universal resonance comparable to the great settings of the Latin Mass. To prepare himself to compose the piece, the nearly 50-year-old Bloch relearned Hebrew, which he had not studied since his bar mitzvah many years earlier, and intensively studied not only the Jewish liturgy but also 16th-century counterpoint. He worked on the composition for four years before its premiere performance in Turin, Italy, in 1934.

Clearfield's "The Golem Psalms" is based on the Jewish legend of Rabbi Leow and the Golem of Prague. The golem is a figure from Jewish folklore, created from mud or clay and brought to life through Kabbalistic incantations; the legend of the Golem of Prague, created to protect the Jews of Prague from violent anti-Semitic uprisings that periodically erupted in the city, appeared at roughly the same time as works of literature — such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — that share similar themes.

The Philadephia Inquirer wrote about the premier of "The Golem Psalms," "What makes the work a Clearfield triumph is the evolution of strengths that have percolated for years in the music of this local composer — her way of elucidating text meaning in deeply vivid ways, but in 'The Golem Psalms' doing so within well-weighted, singable phrases that reflect mastery with large choral and instrumental forces."

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