Last month’s decree by the Jerusalem Regional Court—that the 78 musicians of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (JSO) must be paid their salaries until October 14—is a reprieve for the much-beleaguered orchestra. In June, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority cut funding of the JSO from $2.7 to $1.2 million, and the orchestra was expected to disband by July 15. Judge Ezra Kama ruled that the JSO and the Broadcasting Authority must develop a recovery plan for the future. Let’s hope so.
The JSO’s annual budget is about $4.2 million, only one quarter of the annual budget of the Tel Aviv-based Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO), which is funded in part by the American Friends of the Israel Philharmonic. The JSO has its own American Friends organization, befitting an ensemble founded 69 years ago.
The IPO (which feted its own 70th anniversary this year) has attracted a series of star conductors from its first concert in 1936 led by Arturo Toscanini, and continuing with William Steinberg, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Paray, and Jean Martinon. Zubin Mehta has been the orchestra’s flamboyant and charismatic Music Director for some 30 years. The IPO has made over 100 recordings with conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Paul Kletzki, Carlo Maria Giulini, and István Kertész.
The JSO has experienced less glittery (if solid) podium leadership from Americans Lukas Foss and Lawrence Foster, as well as Israeli musicians Mendi Rodan, Gary Bertini, and David Shallon. In 2000, Shallon died unexpectedly of an asthma attack on a musical tour of Japan, dealing a severe blow to the JSO’s future. More recently, the conductor and President of Bard College Leon Botstein has labored for the orchestra’s survival by fundraising and updating the orchestra’s repertoire. The JSO’s U.S. tour last year earned mixed reviews, but its programming of works by Martinů and Prokofiev was refreshing.
The JSO has made few studio recordings of note, yet the doughty small label Doremi has published a series of its live recordings with the pianist Pnina Salzman (1922-2006), who was known as Israel’s First Lady of the Piano, and who had been student of the famed keyboard pedagogues Alfred Cortot and Magda Tagliaferro. Salzman’s lively temperament matches the JSO’s rough and ready enthusiasm in Franck’s “Symphonic Variations” from 1968; d’ Indy’s “Symphony on a French Mountain Air for piano & orchestra” from 1973; and Chopin’s “Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise Brillante” from 1979.
More than political or financial debates, such concrete examples of performances on CD persuade us of the JSO’s irreplaceability. If the orchestra does fold, Israel will still be left with the IPO, the Haifa Symphony Orchestra, and the Rishon LeZion Symphony Orchestra, among others. Yet we cannot help feeling that Jerusalem the Golden would become a trifle tarnished if its orchestra were somehow allowed to fold. Music lovers, wherever they may be, should therefore paraphrase the Psalmist and declare: “If we forget thee, O Jerusalem Symphony, may our CD players lose their cunning…”
