https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBByvZFa3B0
Latino Ladino: Songs of Exile & Passion. ℗ 2016 Naxos. Released on: 2016-07-08 Artist: Yaniv d'Or Conductor: Amit Tiefenbrunn Ensemble: Ensemble NAYA Ensemble: Barrocade Composer: Yaniv d'Or. From About this Recording: …
D’Or discovered the anonymous Ladino lyric La soledad de la nochada (‘The loneliness of the night’) ... in Greek culture. The darkness of the text moved him … Since the verse was accompanied by no original melody, he composed a new one, stylistically in keeping with the Baroque flavours of the rest of the album. Solemn drones underlie the modal, freely rhythmic, outer sections accompanied by psalterion, while the three-time central portion is more traditionally diatonic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJhnLO3b14U
Exile is a condition in which long periods of peace and prosperity are followed by short episodes of brutal removal and cruelty. Beauty and love thrive during the former, ugliness and hatred during the latter. An artistic culture especially of music and poetry, grown and developed during the peace, sustains the exiles during persecution. Peace is what we all wish for and we say so in the traditional ‘peace be with you’ greeting among Jews—Shalom aleichem—and Arabs—Salaam aleikum—the language of which confirms a common family origin. Both descend from Abraham as do Christians who in their official nightly prayers at Evensong also acknowledge him as their vicarious ancestor. Yaniv d’Or’s programme celebrates this shared heritage in the beauty of song.
The chilling threat to convert or die is not new. It was issued by bullying fifteenth-century Christians in Spain to exiled Jewish and Muslim communities, most of whom took an unspoken third option to leave the country, creating the Sephardic diaspora around the Mediterranean. Among them were Yaniv d’Or’s forebears who landed at Libya where they remained until the twentieth century. Others found their way back to the Holy Land, then under Turkish rule, where the Jews joined a small community at the holy city of Safed in Galilee. They established a centre for Kabbalah, Jewish philosophical thought, which devised a folk prayer based on the Shalom aleichem salutation [1].
The prayer is addressed to two angels, one for peace, one not, which inspect the house every Sabbath eve. If the preparations are approved, peace continues, if not, it ends. The scenario is background to the prayer’s invocation. The text has become closely associated with the tune composed at the start of the twentieth century in America by the exile Rabbi Israel Goldfarb. D’Or sings the opening unaccompanied. A bass line soon supports him, bowed on the viola da gamba or bass viol, which originated in Spain. The harmony is filled in by guitar in the improvised manner of Baroque basso continuo before an instrumental verse led by the psalterion, a hammer-struck stringed instrument evocative of the Eastern Mediterranean. The music becomes more formally Baroque with the harpsichord’s countermelody. Arrangements throughout the recording draw deliberately on diverse semitic and gentile traditions in aural representation of the diaspora over time.
Shabbat shalom.