In the winter of 2020, in the midst of the mourning period for the sudden death of her composer and conductor husband Noam Sharif, his composer wife Ella Milch Sharif responded to Elena Bashkirova’s invitation, and wrote the piece for the clarinet quartet to be performed at the International Chamber Music Festival, at the Jerusalem YMCA, which will open tonight and take place throughout the week ( September 5-10).
“Alena Bashkirova, the artistic director of the festival is happy about the idea” says Milch Sharif. “I’ve always loved the enormous variety of the clarinet, it’s perfect in combination with the string instruments, so I was happy about the opportunity to create the quartet. There aren’t many clarinet quartets, there are works for quintets. Personally, I really like and relate to the quintets of Mozart and Brahms, but if I decided to write for a quintet I would In a big problem, when these giants are sitting on my shoulders, then I decided to create something a little different,” she reveals.
The work written by Milch Sharif consists of three chapters. While the second movement, which is the heart of the work, is based on this lesser-known Kaddish prayer tune (“There are several melodies to Kaddish”) titled ‘Le Zichron’, which the composer dedicates to the memory of Noam Sharif, her late husband who died four years ago. According to her, in the two additional chapters, the first And the third is an expression of the lack of emotional certainty with restlessness and restlessness, when the third chapter also incorporates elements of jazz. “Perhaps the two chapters surrounding the middle Kaddish chapter are less catchy than it. When I wrote them I was in a state of restlessness and this is strongly expressed in the music,” says the composer.
The piece for the clarinet quartet (“Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Viola and Cello”) by Ella Milch Sharif, will be performed on Friday 9/9 at 8:30 PM at the Jerusalem YMCA, as part of the Chamber Music Festival. However, as early as April 2022, the piece was premiered at the Intonations Festival in Berlin “It is a great honor for me that Elena Bashkirova invited me to write for a festival in Jerusalem and Berlin,” says Milch Sharif.
This is not the first work that Milch Sharif has dedicated to the musician, composer and conductor, Noam Sharif, who was her husband for 36 years and died suddenly in 2018. It was preceded by the piece for flute and “Noam” orchestra.
“In ‘Noam’ I included experiences from our last days together. It took me a while to recover from his death, it was a serious knock out, without a breakup. We had a fruitful musical dialogue between us, although we did not create together because each was in his own right, but he was the first to see and hear the My works. His opinion was very significant for me, and vice versa” she shares.
Another recent work by Ella Miller Sharif is “The Eternal Stranger” which was performed in 2020 on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth and is based on a dream written by Beethoven and revealed to him by Noam Sharif. Yehoshua Sobol wrote the text and she composed the music. “The eternal stranger is Beethoven who felt a stranger in Vienna, but he is also the refugee from Syria who found himself in Austria or Germany. Or the wandering Jew who felt a stranger everywhere, and recently of course also the refugees from Ukraine.”
The first performance, conducted by Omer Meir Velber, took place just before the corona closures, in February 2020 at the celebratory concert for Beethoven’s 250th anniversary, and is now being played in other concerts around the world.
Ella Milch Sharif, 68, is the recipient of the Acomm Award for the Paul Ben Haim Foundation and the Prime Minister’s Award for Composers. Her rich creative repertoire includes operas staged in the world’s opera houses, vocal chamber orchestral and solo works performed by world-renowned orchestras, including the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Stockholm Radio Orchestra, the North German Radio Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and more.
She started composing at the age of 12, and there was a time when she indulged in light music and jazz. In the IDF, she served in the Central Command Havi Team, and the song by Noah Varshover, which she composed, “Somewhere in the Bekaa” was a hit, performed by Ruchama Raz, the Havi Team soloist.
She was born in Haifa to Holocaust survivor parents. The father, Dr. Baruch Milch, was a gynecologist and the mother, Lucia, served as his assistant. When their youngest daughter was 13 years old, she was first exposed to the family tragedy when she found her father’s town book, in which he wrote an article in which he told her about his previous family, his first wife, and his three-year-old son. who perished in the Holocaust. “In the evening, when my parents came home from the clinic, I burst into tears and asked how it could be that this story came to my attention by accident.”
What was the reaction?
“Father hugged me and explained that it was difficult for him to talk about what happened. And maybe I was too young to listen or I didn’t want to hear. During my childhood and that of my sister Shosh (the late Shosh Avigal who was a theater and literature critic and died 20 years ago), the Holocaust was present In our house, even if we didn’t fully understand it. The phrase ‘you don’t know and will never know what we’ve been through’ is heard all the time. There were secrets. And there was a gloomy and sad atmosphere. We were afraid to invite friends to our house, and suddenly this information landed on me.
When Dad wrote his memoirs, only then did I understand what they had gone through. Father lost his wife and son in 1943 in the Holocaust. And in 1945 he met my mother when he saved her from the typhoid epidemic. “They fell in love and got married in Poland in 1946, this is also where my sister Shush was born,” says Sharif. The family story of Shush and Ella, the Milch sisters, is at the center of the plot of “The Sins”, the film by director Avi Nesher from 2016. Ella Sharif wrote the music for the film, which won Her at the Best Music Award, at the Montreal Film Festival.
Among the other works focusing on the father’s story, composed by the daughter, “And maybe the sky is empty” for singer Krain and orchestra from 2003, a work based on the diary of the father Dr. Baruch Milch from the time of the Holocaust, which was translated into several languages and performed around the world, as well as the opera “Baruch’s Silence” which focuses on the story of the life, death and life of her father Baruch Milch, and on the anger and reconciliation of Ella and her sister Shush, with the father and mother.
It seems that the personal stories are an engine for your musical work.
“Most of the time the music I write is related to something personal that drives the wheels of creation within me. Over the years the theme of death, loss, separation and dealing with difficult situations is reflected in my music.
Years ago in Vienna at the end of the opera ‘Baruch’s Silence’, a well-known psychoanalyst approached me backstage and said to me: ‘What we psychologists and psychoanalysts do in a hundred hours of therapy, you did in two hours of opera.’