From Where I Sit

The month of January always gets me into HASC mode, even though this year, due to COVID concerns, “A Time for Music 34” (that’s 34 years of these amazing concerts) will be pushed off to February 14 — but will still feature some very exciting firsts in Jewish music (although, in accordance with the well-known concert mystique of keeping the lineup a secret until the curtain rises, I can’t tell you too much else).

Instead of looking toward the uncertain future though, I prefer to look back to those blasts from the past, when we had a dream to go big and reinvent the whole concert formula — it’s still hard to believe we’d actually managed to sell out Lincoln Center at $500 a ticket that very first year. And from where I sit, it’s so much more than just the singers, great as they are.

For me, a truly memorable moment was Yaron Gershovsky playing Abie Rotenberg’s “Hamalach Hagoel” at the HASC 5 concert nearly 30 years ago. It was a popular tune (still is) that every kid would go to sleep with (and probably still do). Yisroel Lamm and Yaron worked on the piece for over two weeks. Yisroel arranged the concerto in classical mode, and Yaron added his personal touches to the piece. Yisroel has told me many times that when the song ended to the deafening applause, he felt that there was actually a malach there, guiding them through it — the music was extremely complicated, and even the orchestra musicians were doubtful that he would pull it off.

Then there was Daniel Ahaviel, the British-born master violinist from Israel, who ran around the stage playing his violin. He began playing with his back to the audience and then faced them, picking up the rhythm and astonishing them by playing like the master violinist he truly is, while dancing around the stage like a wound-up spring.