The establishment's musician - Haaretz

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Tue., August 14, 2007 Av 30, 5767

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The establishment's musician

By Noam Ben-Zeev

Hagai Shaham is leaving Israel for a year abroad. Many people in the Israeli music scene were shocked to learn that a key figure in the local music and pedagogic culture, a wonderful world-class violinist the likes of whom can no longer be found in Israel - the last of his kind, who did not succumb to the many temptations of the Diaspora - is packing his bags and moving with his wife and children to Los Angeles. Ostensibly, we have nothing to fear. After all, this is only a sabbatical. Yet the nagging doubt remains: Will he return?

The pastoral campus at Kibbutz Eilon, which is currently hosting the annual Keshet Eilon summer workshop, is proof of Shaham's central role in Israeli violin music. The kibbutz is teeming with children and teens, and Shaham is busy teaching from morning till night, including a master class each evening. Two young violinists mount the stage and play for him: one performs a concerto by Jean Sibelius, while the other plays a Mozart concerto. He provides each one of them with brilliant comments, based on his infinite professional knowledge, and does so in a pleasant manner, wearing a constant smile. Shaham speaks to them as equals, with the appreciation of a colleague, and not as a maestro to pupils.

Keshet Eilon will soon be reaching its finale, featuring renowned violinists. Over the weekend, there were master classes and recitals with Ida Haendel and a master class with Shlomo Mintz. The final concert will be held this coming Tuesday. Shaham will no longer attend, but his students will. After all, they followed him here - from Spain, Turkey and Finland, among other countries - to the place where, each year, he gives recitals and concerts, accompanied by an orchestra.

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This is not the first time Shaham has left Israel. After completing his studies in 1989, he moved to the United States and joined the acclaimed Guarneri Quartet, with its first violinist Arnold Steinhardt, with whom he still plays. Then he moved to England where he was represented by the largest musicians' agency and signed recording contracts, including with Hyperion. In the mid-'90s, he began to travel between London and Jerusalem, after accepting a teaching position at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Since 1999 he has lived in Israel, although he has been teaching, recording and performing all over the world.

"My return was a planned and conscious decision," says Shaham. "I knew that my children are Israelis and I wanted them to remain Israeli."

Apart from his sabbatical, that is.

Hagai Shaham was born in 1966 and grew up in Kiryat Bialik in a family of amateur musicians. His first musical memory, dating back to the age of 3, is of a home concert, at which his grandparents and friends played Mozart's Quintet in G Minor. "It was a spring evening, and I could not get the melody of the first passage out of my head," recalls Shaham. "I couldn't fall asleep for half the night."

He spent his childhood weekends playing with his father and his colleagues. "They were German immigrant farmers from Kiryat Bialik who went out to the fields each morning at 5 A.M., came home for lunch on time, made sure to nap afterward and drank tea at 5 P.M. They brought the tea with them from Germany, and their music, too. The experience of playing with music lovers is part of who I am - the feeling that you can play anything, and it's not important how it comes out, as long as the love of music and the joy in playing are great." Shaham still has the programs from the chamber series held in Kiryat Bialik in the 1970s: "The Tel Aviv Quartet; Pnina Salzman; the Philharmonic Quintet. Those were sold out concerts," says Shaham. "Last year I tried to revive them, with excellent musicians, such as Arie Vardi, Moshe Epstein and Hillel Zori, but it ended very quickly. The minimum price we could charge, NIS 80 per ticket, was too high - without subsidies, it couldn't work." When he was 12, Shaham was sent to Holon to study with world-renowned teacher Ilona Feher, who has taught such super-violinists as Shmuel Ashkenasi, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Shlomo Mintz.

"Ilona was almost 80 by then," continues Shaham. "A little lady who spoke broken Hebrew but had an amazing personality. I came to her a shy boy, and she changed me completely. After hearing me play, she told me to prepare a Bach piece and another concerto for a master class with Isaac Stern and Dorothy DeLay, the famous teacher from Juilliard, 'And if you play well, you will be my student.' The others didn't matter when I was playing. Her students just wanted to please her."

At that master class, relates Shaham, DeLay guided one of the students and corrected several aspects of his playing: the bow, the fingering, the sound and the posture, and each time the playing improved; but in the middle of the lesson the translator had to go, and asked for a volunteer to replace him.

"Feher immediately jumped up and raised her hand, even though she did not know English and barely spoke Hebrew. After DeLay made a few comments, instead of translating, Feher bent down toward the student and admonished him" - and in recounting this experience Shaham switched to his best Hungarian accent - "'You not listening to anyzing! Play!!' Immediately the student's playing changed, without any connection to the instruction he had received earlier. Anyone could have said that, it is a question of how.

"The first lesson with Feher was always devoted to chess, not to music," continued Shaham. "Fortunately for me, I played the game quite well. My father had taught me. I beat her. She quickly realized it was not worth playing against me."

Shaham, along with violinist Itai Shapira, who was also one of Feher's students, established the Ilona Feher Foundation in New York. The foundation aims to assist young violinists, and is supported by other students of hers.

Why make such an effort?

"It is important to me. I feel the vacuum in violin teaching. Feher, Oedoen Partos - they came from a generation of teaching giants who have passed from this world, and replacements must be found."

Did Ilona Feher herself not raise a generation of teachers and assistants?

"Her motto was, 'You are either a soloist or part of the audience.' That was the purpose of her instruction - not the teaching. And really, all her students are either-or. Some excellent players stopped playing the violin because they could not meet her expectations - or their own - and all those who remained musicians play well, including Ron Ephrat, Yoel Levy and others."

Studying under Feher was never-ending professional stress. "She would come to a student concert all dressed up," recalls Shaham, "sit in the front row, take gold-colored opera glasses out of her alligator purse, and watch us through them throughout the entire concert. At the end of each piece she would hug and kiss the student, then whisper meaningfully in his ear, 'I talk to you next lesson!'" It was the realization of individuality and an uncompromising nurturing of excellence, but with of a strong sense of social responsibility.

"She had fantastic offers from Germany and Japan, but she chose to stay here," says Shaham. "[Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion gave her a tiny apartment in Holon - one room that opened onto another half room. There she taught, and there she died."

It is no wonder, then, that Shaham continues this heritage by teaching within the framework of the Maestro non-profit association in small communities, such as Dimona in the South and Shfaram in the North, working toward establishing a musical element in outlying communities. The first seeds of this sense of social responsibility were sown by Feher and sprouted during Shaham's military service.

"I was in the first group of soldiers granted the status of 'outstanding musician,'" explains Shaham. "We gave concerts and lectures about music. At one of the first concerts, we played in a quartet for 300 soldiers who attended on orders. Tired, browbeaten soldiers, and their attentive listening to music by Bach and Beethoven was phenomenal. That really affected me. I will never forget that concert; the feeling that we had done something important. After all, the army is the last opportunity to educate people."

The list of Shaham's achievements in the past 20 years includes first prizes in international competitions, concerts and recordings on the most important stages, and rave reviews in newspapers and magazines such as Gramophone, The Strad and The Washington Post. His playing reflects his personality: Along with his meticulous virtuosity on the sharpness of every sound, it exudes charm, grace and deep thought. For this reason the invitation from the University of Southern California is not surprising, with its exceptional terms that include a class of just 10 select students, thus allowing him to continue to devote his time to playing.

"When I'm abroad I feel much more Israeli," says Shaham, "and it's difficult for me to express myself on political issues. Everything I received here - my studies at the music center as a child, the America-Israel Culture Foundation - all came from the establishment, and I feel a need to repay this. Without the establishment, I would not be a musician. We would not be meeting here now."

Even so, you have clear political opinions. Why not express them?

"That is not the way to effect change," says Shaham. "If I can educate a generation of young people in music, make them capable of listening, maybe that will prepare them for dialogue among themselves and with others."

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