There were two friends who studied in the ninth grade at the comprehensive high school “Tel Giborim” in Holon in the 1970s. One of them, Dudi Levy, the founder of the “Marginal Youth” band, which is very successful at the time, has become one of the most central and influential figures in Israeli rock. The other, Nir Kabarti, 54, his age, is less well-known in the country, but has since cultivated a world-wide conducting career. It does not bother him to tell, that “I remember since, before I moved to Thelma Yellin, my uncle as a very cute boy and the first appearances of his band, but I was already in a different musical direction.”
“I strive to be as diverse as possible in music, combining the popular and the classical and that an orchestra will not be identified with one musical style and will be the connecting factor between different genres,” says Kabarti, the musical director of the Be’er Sheva Israeli Symphony Orchestra. Her repertoire for the concert season 2022/2023, is the jubilee season of the Negev Orchestra and also its farewell season after five years.
The annual flagship event of the festival, “Classical Spring Festival”, will this time be held as the “Jubilee Festival”, where Avi Ostrovsky, the founder of the orchestra and the first musical director, will win, being only a string orchestra. The highlight of this concert, which will take place in the orchestra’s mythological hall – Beethoven’s “heroics” while Doron Salomon, also one of the orchestra’s musical directors, will conduct the “First Women in Jazz” concert. The German conductor Franz Justus, Cabaret’s predecessor, will conduct a Brahms concerto, with Beer – Sheva-born pianist Assaf Kleinman as lead singer.
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The jubilee season of the Beersheba Orchestra will salute the original work. This is how she will perform with the piano ensemble “Multifiano”, led by Tomer Lev, “The Land of the Four Languages”, a work by Aryeh Lebanon, perhaps on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Works by Noam Sharif and Max Stern, former Beersheba, will also be performed. The festive season will open with a world premiere of “Birkat Hayovel”, a work by young composer Anna Segal. “They will hear more about her,” Cabaret promises. “Her music is a beautiful combination of European culture and what’s going on here.”
As part of Cabaret’s Italian Context, which we will soon address, he brought to his orchestra’s repertoire “Flower in the Desert,” the work that Christian Carrera composed especially for Sinfonietta, with songs that include verses from the book of Isaiah, concerning the Negev. The Negev will also launch performances by local artists, such as international mandolin players Avi Avital and Shmulik Elbaz, as well as singers Dikla, Kobi Oz, Amir Dadon, Roni Dalumi and “With the help of the name, we hope that Yehudit Ravitz will also join.” Among them is also the Safed singer Itai Perl, who was integrated into the nightlife of Beersheba.
Also on the program are Julian Rachelin, one of the top violinists in the world; The Russian ballaika player Dmitry Kalinin and also our Jasmine Levy, who with his arrangements and conducting on Yaron Gottfried’s Sinfonietta, will bring a fragrance of Ladino and Tango in a tribute concert to Mandy Roden, who was the revered musical director of the Sinfonietta. A tribute evening will also be held, conducted by Ziv Kozikaro, to Shmulik Krauss, who previously had a Beersheba episode, on the tenth anniversary of his death.
To move on to Cabaret’s personal story, his family’s roots in Lebanon and Syria. Cabaret, the son of a music teacher, began reading notes before he could read and write. “We had a lot of tools around our house – and I got infected,” he says. “I started with the flute, continued with the trombone and violin, until I locked the piano. That was until I went to the Philharmonic concert. Instead of following the pianist, my eyes were fixed on the Swiss conductor Charles Ditua, whose conduct with the wand in his hand I wanted to be magical.”
Although we won you over as a conductor, after years it turned out that Ditua was no small naughty, that outside of music were bound unflattering titles.
“True, but I prefer to concentrate on music and I learned quite a bit from watching the conducting of great conductors like Claudio Abado, Leonard Bernstein, who in 2018 had the honor of 70 years for the country to win the Sinfonietta in the reconstruction of the Be’er Sheva Philharmonic Concert, which he conducted in ’48. Warriors 1948, Klaus Tenshadt, Seiji Ozawa, Ricardo Moti and more. I must especially mention two – Noam Sharif, who taught me conducting and Zubin Mehta, of whom I was an assistant.
“Noam, an amazing man, to whom I owe a great deal, when he saw me at the age of 17 and a half, he looked at me and said – ‘You will be a winner!’ He taught me to look at a work from the point of view of a composer – and that’s how I behave to this day. As for Zubin Mehta, beyond conducting he influenced the course of my life. “Florence. Although I loved Spain, I could not refuse him. By my name he thought I was Italian and turned to me. I made a big profit from his mistake.”
And another name, which Cabaret mentions with excitement: “When I was a trombone player in the IDF Orchestra under the baton of Yitzhak Graziani, he was the first to give me a chance to win. Once, when our orchestra was supposed to receive the American Secretary of Defense at Ben Gurion Airport, someone like that, Zico could not go out with us and asked me to replace him. He just threw me into the water. “
And later?
“Compared to other guys who when they were discharged from the army, took a backpack and went to South America, or Goa, I went to Vienna. I realized that if I wanted to study in depth the music of Beethoven, Mozart, or Schubert, then only there, in their language, in front of the landscapes they experienced. A one-way ticket and I told myself that there was no way I would return empty-handed. “
Cabaret studied in the city of strudel and waltzes, but later found the love of his life in Florence, being, as mentioned, Mehta’s assistant. When invited to an event at the maestro, he offered the young woman, who caught his attention, when she came to the opera “Othello” with her friends, singers from the local conservatory, to join him. Following the same opera they were married in a civil marriage in the empty castle of Othello in Cyprus and then they remarried in the synagogue of Florence, after that young woman demanded conversion.
Cabaret: “It was like in the story of Ruth the Moabite. When I was supposed to fly to Israel during the intifada, she straight away said she would come with me – and you would refuse. Before the trip to Israel, she bought a book to study Hebrew. When we returned to Italy “I learned things I did not know. Since then we have been together, while alongside her music career she has also studied law. Our children, Adam and Amanda, play.”
Cabaret conducted our Philharmonic, also the Israeli Opera and in the first decade of the millennium served for about six years the musical director of the Raanana Symphony Orchestra. An act that was, so it was. In the midst of the intifada, its musical director, Alvaro Cassuto from Portugal, a Jew in particular, got cold feet. There were those who recommended Cabaret as an emergency conductor. He came, won, won compliments and thanks – and stayed.
His life takes place between three continents. Home in Florence, his main workplace is in the United States, where he has long served as the musical and artistic director of the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra, in California and of course the heart in Israel, where he is due to end his role in Beersheba in 2023. In addition he is in constant motion between orchestras and opera houses around the world, which he is invited to conduct.
How long?
Although Cabaret is aware of legends that winners last a long time thanks to the effort they put into conducting them, he clarifies: “I have no intention of continuing to win until the age of 90. There are more things in life …”