Pianist Jascha Nemtsov might have stumbled into a musical career, but his work as a Jewish musicologist marks him out as a master of his craft, writes Michael Dervan
It was, says Jascha Nemtsov, pure chance that he came to be a musician. He was born in Siberia in 1963, and moved to Leningrad (now St Petersburg) when he was two. His older sister played the piano, and he began in time-honoured fashion by imitating what she was doing. But his is not the story of a prodigious talent, learning outrageously difficult pieces by ear, or quickly passing out his sister in achievement. The piano was a hobby.
When he was around ten or 11 his mother took him aside for a serious conversation about the future. What was he going to study? "I had a great interest in mathematics and history," he recalls, "and even in philosophy. But it was a problem in the Soviet Union that it was not allowed for the Jews to study some professions. There were quotas for Jews. It was not official, but everybody knew about it. One of the few areas in which there were no limitations was music. My mother asked me whether I would like to make some more music and learn it properly, and I had nothing against it. And so I ended up in music school."
The Leningrad he grew up in had a lot to offer a budding musician. The Leningrad Philharmonic was in the hands of the legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky. The great Russian players of the day were to be heard regularly. The four he chooses to list make an interesting contrast: Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter (both well known in the West), but also Yakov Flier and Yakov Zak (both more highly regarded at home than abroad).
His own teacher, Alexander Icharev, was, he says, "not a star. But he was a good teacher. He taught not technique, but aesthetics. For me as a child it was not enough. What I needed at the time was technique." The aesthetics were useful much later, but as a student he read a lot and benefited greatly from the writings of Heinrich Neuhaus, the man who taught Richter, Gilels and Radu Lupu among many others.
Nemtsov's own reputation as a musician is based on his explorations of Jewish music, particular in the unearthing of little-known works by early 20th-century Russian composers who set out to write in a specifically Jewish style. But his awareness of this repertoire was actually minimal during his years in Leningrad.
In spite of the fact that his family was "really conscious of our Jewish origin" and that he describes his father as religious, "I had no information about Jewish music, and no access to the sources. The only Jewish music I heard was religious music at the synagogue, or from my father at home, and then some Jewish folk songs. And in the early 1970s it was still possible to buy some records with Jewish folk songs." But even that became more difficult, as singers emigrated.
It was after his move to Stuttgart in 1992 that things began to happen. "I felt free to say I was Jewish for the first time. I came in contact with some people who were working on Jewish matters, above all with a musicologist, Beate Schröder-Nauenburg, who was engaged on a project about composers who were victims of the Holocaust. I met her, also just by chance, and she asked me to take part in a concert programme, accompanying some songs of the Terezícomposers, Ullmann, Haas and so on." Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) was a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic where many artists were sent and which was used as a propaganda tool by the Nazis. Terezín composers featured in the Decca label's Entartete Musik series, which focused on the music branded "degenerate" by the Nazis. Viktor Ullmann's opera The Emperor of Atlantis was presented by Opera Theatre Company in 2002, Pavel Haas's Sarlatan by the Wexford Festival in 1998.
"I was very fascinated by the music and by the composers' lives and their terrible fate. I also studied a solo programme with music by these composers, and performed both programmes many times in Germany. It was really the beginning of my career as a pianist. In Russia I didn't give any concerts at all. I completed my studies, did military service, and then worked as an accompanist at the music school."
The personal connection to the Terezín composers was very direct. "The Holocaust is something I learned about as a very small child. In our family, there were many victims, my grandparents among them, my uncles and aunts. Both from my father's side and my mother's side, most members were killed by Germans. The Holocaust was very present to me from the very beginning of my conscious life. And now I had a chance to do something in my profession about this. It was really exciting for me."
BUT THERE WAS ALSO a big musical surprise involved. He had always accepted that "the good music is known" and that "when the composers are unknown they are not good". The music of the Terezín composers flatly contradicted that, and his interest in this new repertoire also led him to musicology.
"Later, when I was better at German, I read a lot of what was published about this music that I was not content with. When I play the pieces, I think I have more understanding of the musical structures and contents than some musicologist who's only having a look at the score." And when he aired his ideas, he was invited to write about the music himself.
"That was the beginning of my musical research. They were the first publications in my life." One specialisation led to another. In 1995 he was preparing for a performance of Ullmann's Double Concerto for flute and piano with the conductor Israel Yinon, the man who was to conduct Pavel Haas in Wexford.
"He said to me: 'Jascha, you come from Russia and you know there were some Russian Jewish composers who nobody knows now, for example Achron or Saminsky or Gnessin. It would be interesting for you, you should look into it, you might find a lot there.'
"So first, together with Beate, I went to Berlin, to the Staatsbibliothek, the most important German music library, and ordered what they had of these composers. We got a lot of printed music from the 1920s, went to a separate room with a grand piano, and I played some of the pieces. I must say it was one of the most important days in my life.
"It was not only interesting music by unknown composers, but it sounded really Jewish to me." He scoured other libraries in Germany, procured scores from abroad, and went back to Russia, to research in Moscow and St Petersburg. He's since written and edited books on the school of composition he helped rediscover, and recorded widely, including collaborations with violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky (a former principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra), viola player Tabea Zimmermann, cellist David Geringas, and in an upcoming release, clarinettist Chen Halevi and the Vogler String Quartet.
THE MOVEMENT TO WRITE Jewish music can be traced back to 1908, when a Jewish folk music society was established in St Petersburg.
"It was the first Jewish musical institution in the world, the first secular Jewish musical institution, apart from synagogue music or cantors' societies and so on. It was the first society for Jewish art music, although it was called the Society for Jewish Folk Music. It's a bit complicated. The idea was a society for Jewish music. But the authorities denied the use of this name, because they thought there was no Jewish music, so it was called Society for Jewish Folk Music." The most interesting period, he says, was the 1920s and 1930s. "The first works, created before the Russian Revolution, were more folkloristic, arrangements of Jewish folk songs. In the 1920s and 1930s the Jewish music got a kind of ripeness. It was the most important period. In Russia in the 1930s the movement was suppressed by the Stalinists, and the Jewish musical institutions were dissolved. By the 1930s most composers of this school lived already in the West, in Austria, the US, some also in Palestine.
"The movement existed until the second World War, after which it was affected by the stylistic changes in modern music, and the fact that the national movements were not up to date any more. Nationalism was associated with something evil, with fascism, with racism. Modern music became much more universal. Most of the composers who participated in this school died in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. Some new trends arose in Israel, oriental trends, the desire to create something new, something Israeli. And in Europe there was no Jewish public any more for this music, no audience.
"It was a whole complex of reasons why this music was forgotten after the war, and the direction was not continued. There are still composers who write in a recognisably Jewish style, but the movement and the sense of community that it depended on are long dead."
The Vogler Spring Festival will feature non-Jewish-sounding works by composers of Jewish background (Mendelssohn, Mahler), Jewish-sounding works by Jewish composers (Milhaud, Achron, Grigori Krein, the latter two associated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music) and non-Jewish (Ravel, Shostakovich), and a number of "Hebrew" songs by Russian composers where the Jewishness is about as authentic as the Irishness of Irish stew with curry powder. And there's also a late-night concert by David Orlowsky's Klezmorim. Now there's something Jascha Nemtsov could tell you a thing or two about.
• Jascha Nemtsov plays at the Vogler Spring Festival, which runs at St Columba's Church, Drumcliffe, Co Sligo, from Friday until Monday. Tel: 01-5059582 or 071-9144956
