For the 8th season, clarinetist Paul Green will bring Jewish music to the Berkshires with an international mix of chamber works and song.
His “Summer Celebration of Jewish Music” brings together an ensemble that includes Williams College music faculty Doris Stevenson on piano and Nathaniel Parke on cello — Green also teaches clarinet at the storied school — along with guest violinist Joel Pitchon from Smith College and recently retired longtime Williams Jewish Chaplain and cantor Robert Scherr.
This year, the summer series is centered on the theme “Connectivity Between Cultures.”
Scherr will sing the song “The House I Live In,” made famous by Frank Sinatra after he sang it in a short film of the same name, which was made in 1945 right after World War II to oppose antisemitism. The film went on to receive an honorary Academy Award and the song became a hit for Sinatra. It was also sung by African American singer Paul Robeson.
“It’s a very moving song about the fight against racism and prejudice,” Green said.
The lyrics, he noted, were written by Abel Meeropol, who wrote the lyrics of “Strange Fruit” for Billie Holiday and later adopted the two orphaned sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
“[Scherr] will also sing ‘The Lonely Child’ (Dos Eltne Kind), a Jewish song written within the Vilna ghetto about a child who was hidden and raised by gentiles,” Green said. “The child is singing and wondering where her mother is.”
Also on the program are two chamber pieces. The shorter offering, “Blessing for the Road” was written by contemporary Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran in 2015 as a commission on the occasion of Tanglewood’s 75th anniversary of the TMC.
“It’s an instrumental exhortation calling upon God to protect those who have left their homes, and let them reach their destination in peace and joy, which I thought had some connection to the whole immigrant issue going on in the world today,” Green said.
Scored for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, “it has a contemporary feeling that stretches not just to Jewish people but across racial and ethnic lines.”
In a departure from his usual programming, the main chamber work “Quartet for the End of Time” was written by a composer who was not Jewish. Famed French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote the 50-minute piece and performed it with Jewish musicians while imprisoned in a Nazi Prisoner of War camp for a year after serving as a medic in the French Army.
“It represents his physical struggle to endure that trial and to weave the experience of his Catholic faith,” Green said. “To me, the Jewish experience of the Holocaust really rings deeply in this piece, even though the movements have a lot of Catholic imagery from the Christian Book of Revelations.”
An international solo and symphonic clarinetist encouraged as a prodigy by Leonard Bernstein, Green has visited and resided in the Berkshires since 2006. He had the idea to start a Jewish music festival similar to one in Florida where he had previously lived for 20 years, with the aim to program “a broad panoply of Jewish music of different types.” The first festival took place in 2010, with help from then-director of the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires, Arlene Schiff.
The classical clarinetist is widely known for his crossover approach to klezmer music and jazz, which he recorded on the recent CD “Music Coming Together” performed by his ensemble Two Worlds.
Tickets to the Hevreh concert are $20 and available at the door, payable by cash and check only. This concert is the first in a monthly summer-long series of three programs, which continues with a discussion of Charles Hersch’s book “Jews and Jazz” with live music at the Berkshire Athenaeum on Thursday, July 20, and concludes with a collaboration between Pittsfield’s “Youth Alive” step and drum team, Knesset Israel dancers and Wanda Houston, performed within Mass MoCA’s monumental installation “Until” by artist Nick Cave on Thursday, Aug. 17.
Renowned composer Ernest Bloch once said he wrote Jewish music because it “responds to his Jewish soul,” according to Green. Through his concert series, Green allows Berkshire listeners, whether Jewish or not, to share in that same sensibility.