Jewish synagogue chants in Weilheim's Catholic parish church: the performance of the “Synagogal Ensemble Berlin” on Saturday evening was a great moment for culture and interreligious dialogue.
100 listeners were able to experience it for themselves in the church, and the live stream was viewed over 200 times on the Internet.
Weilheim
- A lot came together happily on this evening in the parish church Mariae Himmelfahrt: the Weilheim organ summer and the festival year “1700 years of Jewish life in Germany”, Weilheim's Catholic church musician and the “Synagogal Ensemble Berlin”, a high-class musical enjoyment and a touching encounter of religions.
The fact that around 100 visitors were able to experience this in the church interior made happiness perfect after such a long cultural desert period.
More would have liked to have been there, but were no longer allowed to admit the corona protection requirements.
All that was left for them was the elaborately visualized live stream on the Internet, which had been viewed 220 times up until yesterday.
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The professional choir from Berlin sang on the gallery, accompanied by the Weilheim organist Jürgen Geiger.
© Schregle
Here, as there, one did not experience an ordinary concert, but a religious and spiritual celebration, which the organizer Ulrich Bracker introduced briefly and yet in a broad arc: He asked for a silent memory of the Jewish families of Weilheim, who were fled by the National Socialists were driven and partly murdered.
And he did not ignore the anti-Semitic activities and misdeeds of our day.
The answer to this should not only be sadness and horror, it is important "to have courage and stand in the way of the agitators".
But then the music spoke and worked. The Berlin choir had rehearsed a program with synagogue chants by South German composers of the 19th and 20th centuries especially for this evening; Among them were new discoveries for the musicians themselves. What a breadth of feelings, how much fervor, what stylistic diversity lies in the chants that Max G. Löwenstamm composed around 1880 and Emanuel Kirschner, 30 or 40 years later, for the Jewish community in Munich! Heinrich Schalit's “Friday evening liturgy” from 1933 is also moving: “Do not leave us”, God is implored in it, “do not break the covenant you made with us”.
Many of the texts come from the psalms that are prayed in the Jewish and Christian faith alike. In the works of that evening they were almost entirely Hebrew; partly it was introduced in German by the deeply moved and touching singing cantor Nikola David, partly because Weilheim's parish priest Engelbert Birkle read the translation beforehand. In between, the choir sang in German a heartfelt psalm setting by Louis Lewandowski, who worked in Berlin in the 19th century. A renowned music festival in the capital is named after him, at which in 2019 Weilheim's church musician Jürgen Geiger and the “Synagogal Ensemble Berlin” (SEB) met each other. At the performance in Weilheim, Geiger accompanied the SEB on the organ, with great sovereignty and extraordinarily soulfulness.
Due to the corona, the professional ensemble around director Regina Yantian and the second cantor Gabriel Loewenheim was reduced to eight singers that evening - who conjured up an astonishing sonority in the parish church in piano and forte, lament and jubilation.
They sang on the organ gallery, but could also be seen by the visitors on the big screen in the chancel.
The atmosphere became even denser when the choir sang a cappella on the altar steps at the end: a bedtime song penned by Paul Ben-Haim.
Meanwhile, there was a deep silence, before and after minutes of applause from the visitors - who heard not only with their ears, but with their souls that evening.
The International Weilheim Organ Summer
In the parish church Mariae Himmelfahrt, the musical devotion “Organ meets guitar” will be continued on Saturday, July 24th, 7 pm: Silvia Elvers and Christian Gruber will play works by Vivaldi, Enjott Schneider and others. Info: www.weilheimer-orgelsommer.de.
