Includes work(s) by Ernst Toch.

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensembles: Vienna Boys Choir, Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Chorus Viennensis. Conductor: Gerald Wirth. Soloists: Naftali Herstik, Shimon Craimer.

This world-premiere recording of scenes from Kurt Weill’s rediscovered masterpiece The Eternal Road brings to life a major 20th-century work that was a sensation of the 1937 New York season. Originally conceived as a biblical pageant, a profound music-drama, and a theatrical extravaganza, The Eternal Road combines the legends of timeless Jewish heroes and heroines with the all-too-familiar story of persecution in Europe. Set against a richly colored backdrop, Weill’s masterful score embodies the passions and aspirations of many dramatic characters in search of their Jewish Destiny.

"...the performance is fervent and touching." — John Rockwell, New York Times

"...exquisitely beautiful, heartfelt, and moving.... This is a music that penetrates to the very core of Weill's being, and ours when we listen to it. The performances—all of them—are beyond any criticism. ...Karl Dent as rabbi/narrator, and mezzo-soprano Barbara Rearick as Ruth are diamonds among a setting composed of nothing but precious gems. This is a standout recording." — Jerry Dubins, Fanfare

Full review from Classics Today:
Kurt Weill's The Eternal Road (1937) was by far his most ambitious theater work, involving more than 250 performers on five stages (as well as a synagogue in the orchestra pit). The production was so costly that despite positive reviews and strong audience attendance, the show's producer was bankrupt at the end of its 153-performance run. Not easily categorized, The Eternal Road artfully combines elements of Bach's Passions with Weill's Broadway shows to form a new type of pageant--sort of a St. Matthew Passion meets Street Scene. So you'll find beautifully florid neo-baroque arias juxtaposed with clever and catchy show tunes. This disc presents the main dramatic and thematic material from the complete work, which lasts more than six hours in performance. Set in an unspecified synagogue in which the Jewish community has taken refuge during a pogrom, The Eternal Road follows the history of the Jewish people from Genesis onward. Weill's main characters include Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Rachel, Moses, Naomi, and Ruth, and Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Headlining the cast is James Maddalena, who takes on the roles of Joseph, Moses, The Seller of Idols, and Chananiah, singing all with his characteristic warm tone and directly communicative style. Barbara Rearick offers beautifully sung portrayals of Miriam and Ruth, where she's joined in a poignant duet by Hanna Wollschläger as Naomi. Other strong performances include Constance Haumann as the Soul of Moses and Ted Christopher as Jeremiah. The only real disappointment is Jacob, sung by a jittery-voiced Ian De Nolfo.

Weill's inimitable music renders the story with powerful effect, even when the translated text (originally in German) occasionally proves less than idiomatic. No matter, the spirit of the work carries through from the performers to the listener, aided by Naxos' spacious (though a touch reverberant) recording. Fans of the composer and followers of the faith surely will agree: it's great to have this Weill rarity available.

--Victor Carr Jr

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

Includes work(s) by Samuel Adler.

Bruce Adolph is a native New Yorker (b. 1955) and a Juilliard graduate (1976). He also studied independently with Milton Babbitt and Vincent Persichetti, and has composed works for numerous top-name artists and ensembles. Many of his concert, stage, and film scores—though by no means all of them—are Judaically theme based, including the score that accompanies the overview documentary on anti-Semitism that introduces visitors to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

For readers unfamiliar with the roots of Ladino, it is, according to the booklet note, “a hybrid secular Sephardi Jewish language, also known as Judeo-Espagnol, which is a fusion of Castilian Spanish (15th century) and Hebrew, dating from the Spanish Expulsion in 1492.” Ladino would subsequently become the main vernacular for generations of Mediterranean Sephardi Jews, playing a major role in their literary and folk-art culture. Adolph composed The Ladino Songs of Love and Suffering in 1983 in response to a commission from soprano Lucy Shelton and well-known horn soloist David Jolley. The request was specific: the piece was to be written for soprano, horn, and guitar, which, according to Adolph, seemed at the time like “an acoustic nightmare.” What often appears implausible, even impossible (bumblebees, the laws of physics tell us, should not be able to fly), often defies expectations. The “acoustic nightmare” turned out to be an acoustic dream combination. Voice, horn, and guitar blend in haunting sonorities in these touching poems of love found, love lost, and love unrequited. Poignantly beautiful music in arrestingly beautiful performances by three of America’s leading artists, Lucy Shelton, soprano, Eliot Fisk, guitar, and David Jolley, horn.

Next up is a generous excerpt (nearly 21 minutes) from Adolph’s two-act opera, Mikhoels the Wise. Written for the “Jewish Opera at the Y” series at New York’s 92nd Street YMHA, and first performed there in 1982, the opera is based on a biographical-historical account of the life and career of actor Solomon Mikhoels (1890–1948) who went by the stage name of Solomon Vovsi. Head of the Moscow State Jewish Theater for many years following the Bolshevik revolution, Mikhoels became an unwitting dupe of Stalin, and was eventually murdered by the Soviet secret police. The excerpt offered here is scene 4 of act 1: “A Train Station in Birobidzhan at Midnight,” in which Mikhoels arrives in Birobidzhan where he is met by Sin-Cha, a young Korean telegraph operator from Vladivostok. All of this takes place following the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (1931–2). Sin-Cha, who just happens to speak Yiddish (only in opera!), explains to Mikhoels that the Japanese atrocities against her people have aroused in her a deep sympathy for the plight of the Jews, and that she has come to Birobidzhan to help the Jewish people build a Socialist society of their own. (No wonder Stalin saw in Mikhoels a useful political tool). The music that accompanies this scene is highly colorful and, at times, dramatic. The singing, while more “speechified” than melodic, is nonetheless quite moving, and seems to follow closely the inflections of the instrumental lines. Erie Mills, soprano, who sings the role of Sin-Cha, and Nathaniel Watson, baritone, who sings the role of Mikhoels, both sound quite convincing, as does Gerard Schwarz conducting the Seattle Symphony.

Out of the Whirlwind, which concludes the program, might best be described as a non-liturgical cantata. It consists of six movements, each based on Yiddish songs composed by Holocaust victims, some of whom survived the concentration camps, and others who did not. The work was commissioned by Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Allied liberation of the German camps. It was first performed in 1984, one year prior to the anniversary. Scored for mezzo-soprano, tenor, large wind ensemble, piano, harp, and bass, the general style of the work is not too far removed from the Mikhoels the Wise excerpt. Colorful orchestration, frequently punctuated by dramatic outbursts, serves as underpinning to generally declamatory but occasionally soaring vocal lyricism. This is a very beautiful and emotionally wrenching work, and it is gorgeously sung by John Aler, tenor, and Phyllis Pancella, mezzo-soprano. Rodney Winther conducts the College-Conservatory of Music Wind Symphony most sympathetically.

Of the Naxos Milken Archive discs I have thus far been privileged to hear and review, this one I think is most likely to transcend any parochial considerations. This should enjoy very wide appeal. Highly recommended.

-- Jerry Dubins, Fanfare

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensembles: Schola Hebraeica, New London Children's Choir. Conductor: Neil Levin. Soloist: Hazzan Ira Rodhe.

The Milken Archive of American Jewish Music is a vast recorded panorama of the rich body of Jewish music, both sacred and secular, that has developed over the course of American history. This abundant repertoire, in its remarkable breadth and diversity, not only reflects the history, evolution, and variety of the Jewish experience in America, but, by extension, attests to Jewish continuity and renewal through more than five millennia, revealing universal qualities that can speak to people of all faiths and cultures.

“To listen to its 19 selections...is to experience a sampling of the huge breadth of American Jewish music.” — Cantor Steven Blane, New Jersey Jewish Standard

“...provides a table of hors d’oeuvres for what is to come...Haskivenu...is particularly lovely. All of the performances here are top-notch.” — Jerry Dubins, Fanfare

“This will give you a taste - I underscore taste - of the works of 37 composers that are included in this marvelous collection of American Jewish music, a collection that is sure to become an important part of the recorded literature of all American music.” — Copley News Service

“It gives a good indication of the project’s production values: up-to-date engineering, full and scholarly notes by Neil W. Levin (the Archive’s Artistic Director), and translations...of sung material. The sampler also sketches out the aesthetic reach of the venture.” — Peter Rabinowitz, International Record Review

“The propulsive and dynamic Brubeck is powered along at full tilt crossed with a typically swaying Jewish accent. The down and dirty Hudl mint shtrudl is the equivalent of a racy song by George Formby—saucy and with a clarinet played scatty Chassidic for all it is worth as slippery as oil...[Milhaud’s Sacred Service] ...joyous...[Achron]...is music of the utmost inventive resource—full of colourful Technicolor rivalry among the instruments of the orchestra...[Weill’s The Etneral Road]...whispered serenity from the choir and a piannisimo solo violin rise to the disturbing suggestion of disillusion. Serenity reflects the God of the Israelites while the wilder beat reflects the followers of the golden calf. Eventually the joyous ‘calf tune’ is taken over by the Israelites to reflect an excited joy.” — Rob Barnett, MusicWeb-International.com

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

"Dionysian imbalanced exaltation… from restless, mysterious meditation of strongly religious character to dizzying Dervish-like ecstasy" was how one newspaper critic described the 1927 premiere of Achron’s Violin Concerto no. 1. In fact, Achron filled his concerto with biblical cantillation melodies that have roots in Jewish antiquity. Mysterious legends of the past and biblical stories also inspired him to create exotic orchestral tone poems based on the Golem of Prague and Belshazzar’s Feast. All of these works are recorded here for the first time.

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

Includes song(s) by Herbert Fromm.
Includes work(s) by Samuel Adler. Ensemble: Schola Hebraeica. Soloists: Moshe Haschel, Benzion Miller.

"It is a work of love, it is the voice of a creature communicating with his God, and I hear that when I hear the Service Sacré," declared Madame Madeleine Milhaud, the composer's widow, when, at age ninety-eight, she was interviewed by the Milken Archive in advance of this first-ever complete recording of Milhaud's greatest Jewish work. Presented here for the first time with the settings for the Friday evening liturgy, which were composed after the work's commission and premiere at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, the Service Sacré can finally be heard in its entirety as the composer intended.

Full review from Classics Today:
Along with Ernest Bloch's Sacred Service, Milhaud's Service Sacré is one of the relatively rare major works of Jewish liturgy that are as amenable to the concert hall as to the synagogue. Both were commissioned by San Francisco's Temple Emanuel-El and its cantor, Reuben Rinder; both utilize a baritone soloist, large chorus, and orchestra; and both were written by European-born American composers acutely aware of their Jewish heritage. The Bloch, written in 1930, has long been recognized as an important work, and this recording should help call attention to Milhaud's achievement as well.


The text is the Sabbath morning service as laid out in the Union Prayer Book of the American Reform movement. Naxos appends to the 1947 score the five settings of texts used in the more frequented Friday night services later added by the composer. Milhaud also includes passages for a reciter reading prayers in English, accompanied by beautifully scored orchestral backgrounds. Milhaud tailored the vocal solo and choral settings to the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew then prevalent in American synagogues, but he preferred the pronunciation familiar to him from his native Provence, which was closer to the Sephardi. The booklet says that Sephardi pronunication is used in this recording; Hebrew speakers will recognize it as contemporary Israeli spoken Hebrew, flawlessly handled by the Czech chorus and Israeli baritone soloist.


Written in the shadow of the Holocaust, which claimed more than 20 of his cousins, Milhaud's Service Sacré is a personal affirmation of faith and a universal expression of serenity, joy, and longing for peace. The music often alternates between the lyric and the declamatory, sometimes turning on a dime. The baritone solos, well sung by Yaron Windmueller, tend to brevity and often lead into or out of choral passages, as in the Bar'khu's declamatory, timpani-punctuated praise to the Lord. Americanisms abound--as in the snare drum-accompanied chorale Mi Khamokha and in the Copland/Harris horizons of K'dusha, whose repeated cymbal crashes add to the joyous closing Hallelujahs.


There are tonal allusions to the medieval as well as to the modern, and Milhaud's beloved Provencal melodies surface throughout the score. Time and again, there's a melodic fragment or an orchestral passage that rivets our interest, such as the tenderly hushed strings and the muted trumpets in the Kaddish. Gerard Schwarz leads the Czech Philharmonic with energy and lends the lyric sections the tenderness they need. If the recording lacks the last word in transparency, it is more than adequate to convey Milhaud's vision. Naxos provides English texts and translations, but a transliterated version of the Hebrew original would have been welcome.
--Dan Davis, ClassicsToday.com

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

Includes work(s) by Leonard Bernstein.

Fully restored from recently discovered original manuscripts, the Genesis Suite depicts the earliest Bible stories, narrated by distinguished actors accompanied by full orchestra and chorus. This unique collaboration of seven famous composers was performed only once, in 1945, before much of the music was lost in a fire.

WINNER: 2005 Grammy Award to David Frost – “Producer of the Year, Classical” for Genesis Suite and four other Milken Archive CDs

“The whole idea of the work has long interested me and it’s wonderful to have it fully restored with all the missing sections and given its first modern recording here under Gerard Schwarz’s baton... Fascinating and audacious...” — John Sunier, Audiophile Audition

“The most significant recent release from the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music... The performances by Gerard Schwarz with the Ernst Senff Choir and Berlin Radio Orchestra are excellent.” — Turok’s Choice

“...here, for the first time in state-of-the-art sound and a magnificent performance led by Gerard Schwarz, you can experience the Genesis Suite in its entirety. Documenting, as it does, an interesting slice of music history in 1940s America, this release is welcome and I would grant even important.” — Jerry Dubins, Fanfare (March/April 2005)

“One of the most fascinating...of the discs in the series... The contributions from Schoenberg and Stravinsky, which bookend the work, are by far the best: concise evocations of primordial chaos striving toward order (Schoenberg) and Creation devolving back toward chaos at the Tower of Babel (Stravinsky). Stravinsky’s ‘Babel’ has a cool sensibility that grows eerie, haunted by his mysterious melodies and rhythms, as well as a long, legato choral chant backed by double-tonguing flutes that evoke the scattering of humanity.” — Richard Scheinin, San Jose Mercury News

“[Schoenberg is]...well chosen for his uncompromising portrayal of the primordial chaotic miasma. The music is suitably dodecaphonic—whirling and active. [Shilkret] supplies a richly stocked and constantly allusive Hollywood-style score. The music is super-Straussian with the vocalising choir painting the dawn of light in a blindingly cinematic evocation... Great fun – an example of saturated cinema kitsch. Golden Age film score aficionados must lose no time and get a copy of this disc immediately. [Milhaud gives] a brisk and vigorous retelling with dramatic music. [Castelnuovo-Tedesco]...his tender music is genuinely touching as you find whenever the narration speaks of Noah and his family. [Toch]...provides the work’s optimistic centre of gravity with its repeated imperious concluding fanfares. [Stravinsky]...links with various of his concert works including Oedipus Rex and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments... A fascinating record of a remarkable moment in time. Its chrome-plated musical sensationalism is enjoyable... I thought it was great fun.” — Rob Barnett, MusicWeb-International.com

“...a fascinating and incredibly diverse musical pastiche that is well worth the effort that went into rescuing it... Their shared mission—to musically illustrate the foundations of Judeo-Christian beliefs—led to grand, cinematically conceived music from most of them... Schoenberg’s skillfully manipulated tone rows make for an eerie, but musically orderly evocation of primordial chaos, while setting an expectant and reverent tone... Shilkret, in perhaps the most cinematic-sounding music here, begins with his own rather atonal miniprelude before underscoring the narrators’ storytelling with dramatic and richly diatonic musical fabric... Wonder and suspense infuse Tansman’s densely atmospheric and mostly tonal epic of Adam and Eve. The narrative declamation of the Creator’s dire lines after the fall is especially true to his rhythmic design, adding weight and severity... Milhaud’s short and punchy Cain-and-Abel episode is the angriest and most startling music here. Like Tansman, he writes episodically, also calling for precise rhythmic synchronization of narrations and music and emphatic moments... [Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s] striking and melodramatic treatment of the Flood story is highly illustrative, in keeping with the best Hollywood style... Perhaps the suite’s most radiant and comforting music comes from Toch. After a somber introductory fugue, the composer does a superb job of realizing the Lord’s promise of a better future... Stravinsky finished the work with the compact, but skillfully assembled Babel movement... Performances are outstanding and nicely recorded....Naxos’s usual excellent notes... Try it — I think you’ll really like it.” — Lindsay Koob, American Record Guide (March/April 2005)

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

The WORLD PREMIERE RECORDING of Stefan Wolpe’s orchestral suite from the ballet The Man from Midian reveals a superbly crafted concert work by one of the 20th century’s most fascinating composers. Also featured on this CD are excerpts from the concert suite from the ballet Moïse by Darius Milhaud. Both ballets are based on the life of Moses and were born out of two unique commissions during the 1940s. The historical development of both works is chronicled in an extensive essay by Neil W. Levin. Recorded here for the first time are excerpts from the opera-ballet The Vision of Ariel by Lazare Saminsky, a leading figure in the groundbreaking Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg before he immigrated to the United States, where he exerted a profound influence on music of American Reform worship. Three soulful Hassidic dances by Chicago-born Leon Stein open the CD celebration of Jewish dance in America.

“The Milhaud score contains typical harmonic inventiveness amid eastern tinges and majestic flourishes. Wolpe's setting is alternately spare and dense, bristling with energy and atmosphere, deftly scored (including saxophones). The disc's other two works are immediately appealing: Leon Stein's Three Hassidic Dances are fully of swirling and poetic orchestral activity; excerpts from Lazare Saminsky's operaballet The Vision of Ariel exude radiance, pride and dramatic intensity, with help from a tenor soloist, chorus and orchestra. There's no shortage of spiritual or artistic commitment, and the copious programme-notes are excellent." — Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone (Dec. 2006)

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

Heroic Jewish resistance to German barbarity during the Holocaust was indelibly manifested in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Facing imminent deportation to death camps and preferring, if necessary, to die with dignity in battle, thousands of Jews rose up in armed defiance of their tormentors. Their fierce but doomed struggle—against unimaginable horrors and overwhelming odds—began during Passover, the Festival on which Jews recount the story of the Exodus from Egypt through a canonized narrative, or haggada. After the war, American composer Max Helfman, a legendary champion of Jewish music, immortalized the uprising in his dramatic choral tone poem Di Naye Hagode (The New Haggada), based on Itzik Fefer's epic Yiddish poem The Shadows of the Warsaw Ghetto. For Fefer, who was murdered in Stalin's postwar terror against Soviet Jewry, both Germany's genocide and the episodes of armed Jewish response had become the Jewish people's new, central, and most relevant narrative. Like the Passover haggada, this story must be told and retold, lest a single Jew of the Warsaw Ghetto ever be forgotten. Fefer's poem conveys modern Jewish determination to resist and to remember, and that resolve—to remember forever— is underscored by Helfman's powerful music. Di Naye Hagode is presented here in its world premiere recording.

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.