Leader, Jean POUGNET
Conductor, HERBERT MENGES
ERNEST LUSH (pianoforte)
Ernest Bloch is the first composer to express successfully the Jewish national idiom in music. It is not my desire to attempt a "reconstruction" " of Jewish music says Bloch. ' It is the Jewish soul that interests me, the complex, glowing, agitated soul that I feel vibrating throughout the Bible..... All this is in us, all this is in me, and it is the better part of me. It is all this that I endeavour to hear in myself and to transcribe in my music ; the venerable emotion of the race that slumbers way down in our soul'.
Even in his more or less abstract music, such as the Piano Quintet and the Concerto Grosso, ' the emotion of the race ' is expressed. The Concerto Grosso, designed on classical lines, was written during 1924-5 for Bloch's pupils at the Cleveland Institute of Music.