Hemsi Song Cycle

Orchestration of selected songs from Alberto Hemsi's "Coplas sefardias"

I. Malaña tripa de madre, op. 34, no. 1

II. Bueno asi biva la coshuegra, op. 34, no. 2

III. Tres hermanicas eran, op. 34, no. 3

IV. La morenica, op. 34, no. 4

V. Mi padre era de Francia, op. 45, no. 2

VI. El buen viar, op. 34, no. 6

Excerpts (op. 34, nos. 2, 3, 4 and 6):

Reut Ventorero, mezzo-soprano | Israel Camerata Jerusalem | Conductor: Nir Cohen-Shalit (2024)

The Jewish composer, conductor, and musicologist Alberto Hemsi was born in Kasaba (Turgutlu), Turkey, to a family of Spanish exiles holding Italian citizenship. At the age of ten, his parents sent him to his uncle in Izmir, and in the big-city school, the boy acquired playing skills on the piano, flute, clarinet, and trombone. His musical talent was soon detected, and – equipped with a charitable scholarship – Alberto went to Milan (1913) to study at the Verdi Conservatory. However, his studies were cut short: as an Italian citizen, he was “invited” in 1917 to join his country in “The War to End Wars.” A severe hand injury prevented him from realizing his dream of becoming a concert pianist, and back in Izmir, Hemsi began his ethnomusicological odyssey; in 1923, he continued his research in Rhodes, and four years later, at the invitation of the chief rabbi of Alexandria, he became the leader of the Jewish Community’s musical life. Parallelly, he taught at the city’s conservatory. But, yet another war changed his life course: the Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt at the end of 1956 aroused anti-Jewish feelings among his non-Jewish neighbors, and Hemsi sought a new home. He chose Paris and became the musical director of the city’s two Sephardic Synagogues. During his activity in the Eastern Mediterranean, Hemsi worked on a collection of songs sung by Sephardic Jews. Similarly to Bartók and Kodály, he recorded, sorted, compared, and annotated, assembling over two hundred songs in handwriting. His “Cancionero Sephard.” is kept at the National Library in Jerusalem. In 1995, Prof. Edwin Seroussi edited Hemsi’s collection, added introductions, appendices, and indexes, and published it through the HU Center for the Study of Jewish Music. Hemsi arranged sixty of the collected songs for voice and piano and published them in ten volumes under the name “Judeo-Spanish Coplas”. In this comprehensive oeuvre, he was influenced by folk-music-based works by French and Spanish composers such as Ravel, Granados, Albeniz, and De Falla. However, he knew how to find original solutions to treat his unique Jewish material. Included here are four songs from the collection, orchestrated by composer and pianist Menachem Wiesenberg, who, together with alto Mira Zakai, was the first to recoded a selection of 24 Coplas, for a commercial recording made in 1990.