Ken Gould interviewing the Greek-American cantor Alberto Mizrahi, the “Jewish Pavarotti”, who performs in our country.

Pulsing tone clusters are flowing from the rehearsal room of Studio One in the Amsterdam Muziektheater. I quietly sneak in, while composer Benedict Weisser is accompanying the rehearsal on the piano. The actual conductor is David Porcelijn. The Greek-American cantor Alberto Mizrahi has just been flown in from Chicago to prepare the premiers of the two new pieces in one concert called Kavanah. The complex rhythms and upbeat melodies remind me of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. Conductor David Porcelijn is counting out loud as quickly as lightning: “One two three four, one two three four five, one two, one two three four five six seven.” During this first rehearsal there is an atmosphere present of give and take. Weisser shouts: “It has to be soft and delicate.” Mizrahi: “But it is a Barchu, a call for prayer!” After some haggling there is a musical solution. At the end of the rehearsal everyone is both content and a bit tired.

Jetlagged
After the rehearsal I have the opportunity to speak with a jetlagged but very friendly Alberto Mizrahi about his role as cantor and his Dutch tour which starts this weekend.
“ Cantor music is pure emotion; we let our passion take its own course”, he starts enthusiastic. “Of course it also depends on the lyrics and on the chazzan. Every cantor has his own formula for success, depending on character and voice. The formula of my teacher was: ‘When you eventually get the attention of the community, you should hold on to it’.”

Mizrahi came to the Netherlands for the first time in 2002 to perform at the International Jewish Music Festival. Since then he became even more famous, both here as worldwide, thanks to his concerts two years ago in the Amsterdam Portuguese Synagogue. Composer Weisser was also closely involved in the program Cantors: A Faith in Song, as musical director and arranger. Meanwhile the video registration has become a successful DVD. Mizrahi laughs about his nickname “the Jewish Pavarotti”. “Well, I am a full-grown lyric tenor – not spinto (a voice that is fit for being pushed up to dramatic climaxes – KG). Someone once called me “the Jewish Pavarotti” and such things stick. But someone suggested they call him the Italian Mizrahi.”
He likes to talk about the role of “kavana” (Hebrew for intention) in the program. “Kavana is my core activity; it is what I try to convey to my community when I sing a prayer on their behalf. The concept is hard to translate; it means intention, but also concentration. It is the extent to which you dedicate yourself to the prayer. It is that which the Dervish try to experience by whirling around for hours. He tries to be released into a deeper spiritual insight. You would expect that reciting the same texts week after week would become boring, but that is not the case. It is the function and the privilege of the cantor to let the words take off from the book and let them fly. The cantor throws the words like lances toward the community. Maybe they’re waiting for the show to begin, or more likely, to end”, he jokes, “but then the lances come to pierce their hearts and brains. Perhaps only then the idea to really read and understand the text takes place. That is kavana.”

Is such a thing also possible with classical music? “Sometimes I think that the worst thing that ever happened to music is that it got jotted down, because with that it loses the improvisation. But classical music, if it is inspired, certainly requires the same concentration. You can hear it when a professional musician makes music with kavana, he/she sounds as if on the very edge of their emotional capacity.”

But isn’t it hard to retrieve ones own kavana in contemporary music like this one? “I sometimes need to concentrate myself on the notes and therefore can’t focus on the lyrics. These adaptations of traditional melodies are difficult to sing and I’m not allowed to improvise like I’m used to. It is a limitation, but Benedict has a very Jewish soul. He is a descendant of two famous cantor families and he has elaborate knowledge of the cantor repertoire. His way of composing gives you the feeling: ‘Yes! I recognize this music’, even though it’s new. Concerning finding the kavana: it means simply hard work every time you explore a new musical piece. But when the time comes, a certain ecstasy appears – which I translate as ‘kavana’.”

Liturgy of the heart
Is this concert closer to art or religion? “The goal of this concert is to blend together contemporary with traditional music. Besides the piece by Benedict Weisser there is also a beautiful new work by Vanessa Lann with a poem by Bialik, with references to cabbala and Zohar. This poem is close to ‘improvisational liturgy of the heart’. And then there are in the program three rarely heard songs, so called Romanceros, Sephardic songs in Ladino, the Castillian equivalent of Yiddish. The theme of ‘Noches noches’ is the idea that the night is for love. ‘Una matica ruda’ is about a sprig of rue which was given by a young man to a young lady whom he fancied, and ‘La comida’ is a conversation between a young girl, who is fast becoming a woman, and her mother.”

It is remarkable how enthusiastic Alberto Mizrahi speaks about all these different kinds of music he made himself familiar with. When has his love for music begun? “When I was five years old my mother had to stay in the hospital for few days and for the first time I really spent time with my father. He took me to the cinema and we saw Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso. This movie suddenly made everything concrete to me, like: Ah, that’s the way one performs music! Until today I have the same feeling about music.”

Ken Gould is professional singer and also cantor at the Liberal-Jewish Community in The Hague.