Between Worlds

A Conversation with Avi Avital

Avi Avital’s album Between Worlds, released in 2014, not only continued his ongoing quest to expand the repertoire of his instrument, the mandolin, but broke new ground in his exploration of the connections between classical idioms and the vitality of authentic folk sources. Together with his ten-member Between Worlds Ensemble, Avital brings a series of three programs to the Pierre Boulez Saal this season, illuminating the interactions between these realms and the musicians who interpret them.

What inspired you to create the Between Worlds Ensemble?

I navigate a triangle that involves a specific genre of classical music associated with cultural identity, the instrument that I play, and my own cultural or artistic identity. Regarding the first angle, at the beginning of the 20th century there was a stream of making art music—or so-called “classical music”—that was influenced by some kind of national cultural identity. Many composers practiced this by taking folk melodies from their own culture and turning them into art music. They did so by harmonizing the folk sources differently or by restructuring them or even by presenting them in formal contexts, such as a sonata, to introduce the complexity and finesse of classical music. Still another way was to adapt this material to classical concert instrumentation like the piano or string quartet.

Who are some of the composers you’re thinking of in this context?

Béla Bartók maybe is the best example. He went around chasing these melodies and taping them using rather primitive recording devices. Back in his studio, he reimagined them as works for piano, string quartet, orchestra, and so on. A few decades earlier, Antonín Dvořák composed pieces inspired by his Bohemian folk music heritage—before he was hired to help Americans with this practice by integrating spirituals and American folk music into a classical context. The same thing happened in the 20th century in South America with composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos or Astor Piazzolla, who brought tango into the concert hall. In Spain and on the Iberian Peninsula, the area we explored in our first program last November, there were composers like Manuel de Falla, Enrique Granados, and Isaac Albéniz. With the Between Worlds Ensemble project, we are commissioning composers and arrangers who are living today to do exactly the same thing.

For audiences at the time, bringing something from the folk culture to the concert hall must have felt very modern and exciting and innovative. What made it folkloric in the first place, and what makes it classical music? And, more interestingly, how do you translate the same action for a 21st-century audience, where everyone is literally two clicks away from every kind of music in the world? How do we play on listeners’ expectations, given the current state of the ceremonial rules of the concert hall? How do I guide the live audience into this experience that I want to evoke of going back and forth from folklore to classical?

Your instrument, the mandolin, plays a key role in trying to recapture that sense of excitement for an audience of today …

The mandolin has always enjoyed an ambiguous identity somewhere between folk tradition and classical music. It’s an 18th-century Baroque Italian instrument, but the collective notion is much more associated with folk than art music. Vivaldi wrote for the mandolin, but it’s also a symbol for Neapolitan folk songs. The mandolin is used for bluegrass music or in Brazil for choro music. I realized that the instrument has the ability to dialogue with these origins, so when I play Italian classical music inspired by folk sources on a mandolin it sounds more Italian, or when I play the “American” Quartet by Dvořák on a mandolin it sounds blue-grassy. The music has all these references both from the instrument and in a broader sense from a folkloristic sound.

So when I was thinking of how to translate the action of the composers I mentioned from 100 or so years ago to today, this became one element. The mandolin itself carries a lot of these folkloristic references. The musicians of the Between Worlds

Ensemble are not bound to a single style of music—they are fully aware of the folk origins of what we play, so there is a back and forth between the first seed of inspiration of these composers and the way we perform and refilter it for a modern audience in a concert hall.

What about your own cultural background and artistic identity—how do they relate to the vision you’re exploring with the Between Worlds Ensemble?

I grew up in a deeply multicultural environment, having been born to Israeli parents from Morocco; the parents of everyone in my class came from different countries. Playing in a mandolin orchestra run by our conservatory gave me my education in classical music. We played Bach and Mozart and Beethoven but also folk music from America, Israel, Russia, and Italy. This is how my artistic identity was formed. So for me classical music wasn’t a bubble world. It was one of many dialects, along with jazz and folk—one of many ways to generate an experience for the listener that involves the universal elements of music. For me, all these borders were very blurry. I was drawn to taking the nuances from each one of these dialects and discovering what the mechanism inside was. That led me to become very interested in many other genres. I was playing a lot of folk, klezmer, or Balkan music; I improvised; I would play with jazz musicians. It’s within this kind of versatility that I see the Between Worlds Ensemble.

The ensemble combines woodwinds, strings, and percussion … I chose a formation of instruments that would lend itself to be flexible, like a chameleon, to interact with varying references from folk music. The percussion is the most immediately folk-like element and adds the raw idea of rhythm. The flute you hear in many different cultures, and the strings can go back and forth from a classical ensemble sound to enhancing and blending with a folkloristic sound. The plucked strings of the harp complement the sound of the mandolin. There is no piano because it’s definitely a Western classical instrument.

But it’s not only about the sounds, it’s just as much about the instrumentalists—musicians who, like myself, do not play only classical music but also improvise and have wide-ranging experience performing different genres of music that feed each other. The people I chose for this ensemble, in one way or another, have this in common. They are curious, they are not bound to a specific way of playing or school of thought, and they are constant explorers of the nuances that help us recognize what makes one type of folk music different from another.

What is the relationship between these core members of the Between Worlds Ensemble and the guest artists joining them as part of your Pierre Boulez Saal residency?

One part of what the ensemble does is to take music written by classical composers—much of it from the beginning of the 20th century—who were inspired by folk sources. On the other side of the spectrum is the authentic stuff, the UNESCO heritage level of preservation of those traditions that have survived without reharmonizing, restructuring, retouching. This is the element that the guest musicians are bringing to their interactions with the ensemble. As a result, we have the classical pieces, the folklore, and everything that’s in the middle. This current incarnation of the Between Worlds Ensemble takes the triangle that I have described to the next level.

What should audiences be listening for, and what do you hope they will take away from these concerts?

I want to walk the audience through an experience that includes opposing forces, that goes back and forth from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from classical finesse to the spontaneity of an ancient tradition. Hopefully this tension between different genres of music, between different approaches, between the new and the old will evoke some thoughts about identity and universalism and offer an experience that is rich and new and reflective of our times.

Interview: Thomas May

First published in the program book for the concert of Avi Avital and the Between Worlds Ensemble at the Pierre Boulez Saal on November 23, 2022.

Avi Avital

Fast im Alleingang ist es Avi Avital in den vergangenen Jahren gelungen, die Mandoline als klassisches Instrument zurück in die Konzertsäle zu bringen. Geboren 1978 in Israel, begann er mit acht Jahren, Mandoline zu spielen. Seine Ausbildung absolvierte er an der Musikakademie in Jerusalem und am Konservatorium in Padua, wo er bei Ugo Orlandi das historische Mandolinen-Repertoire studierte. Der Durchbruch gelang ihm 2007 mit einem Sieg beim israelischen AvivWettbewerb. Seitdem tritt er in den großen Musikzentren der Welt auf, darunter die Londoner Wigmore Hall, die Carnegie Hall und das Lincoln Center in New York, die Berliner Philharmonie, das Wiener Konzerthaus und das Gewandhaus Leipzig sowie die Festivals in Salzburg, Luzern, Aspen, Verbier und Tanglewood. Neben dem klassischen Repertoire, das er oft in eigenen Transkriptionen spielt, widmet er sich auch vielen anderen musikalischen Genres und arbeitet u.a. mit Künstler:innen wie Ksenija Sidorova, Omer Avital und Giovanni Sollima, der Schauspielerin Martina Gedeck und dem georgischen Puppentheater Budrugana Gagra zusammen. Er hat über 100 Werke für die Mandoline in Auftrag gegeben, erst kürzlich zwei neue Konzerte für Mandoline und Symphonieorchester. Unter seinen Aufnahmen finden sich Konzerte von Bach und Vivaldi, Kammermusik von Ernest Bloch und Manuel de Falla kombiniert mit bulgarischer Volksmusik, und Werke zeitgenössiscer

Komponist:innen, von denen viele ihm gewidmet sind. Als erster Mandolinist überhaupt wurde Avi Avital 2010 für einen Grammy nominiert.

Over the past few years, Avi Avital has almost single-handedly reestablished the mandolin as a classical instrument on the concert podium. Born in Israel in 1978, he received his education at the music academy in Jerusalem and at the conservatory in Parma, Italy, where he studied the historic mandolin repertoire with Ugo Orlandi. Since his breakthrough prize win at the 2007 Aviv Competition in Israel, he has appeared at major venues around the world, including London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Berlin’s Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Leipzig

Gewandhaus, and the festivals of Salzburg, Lucerne, Aspen, Verbier, and Tanglewood. In addition to the classical repertoire, which he often performs in his own transcriptions, he has worked in many other genres and collaborated with artists such as Ksenija Sidorova, Omer Avital, and Giovanni Sollima, actress Martina Gedeck, and the Georgian puppet theater Budrugana Gagra. He has commissioned more than 100 works for the mandolin, most recently two concertos for mandolin and symphony orchestra. Among his recordings are concertos of Bach and Vivaldi, chamber music by Ernest Bloch and Manuel de Falla, which he combined with Bulgarian folk music, and a number of works by contemporary composers, many of them dedicated to him. In 2010, Avi Avital became the first ever mandolinist to receive a Grammy nomination.

Ensemble „Rustavi“

Der Chor des 1968 von Anzor Erkomaishvili gegründeten State Academic Ensemble „Rustavi“ vereint Sänger aus verschiedenen Regionen Georgiens und verbindet so unterschiedliche Aufführungstraditionen des Landes. Das Ensemble, zu dem neben dem Chor auch eine Tanzkompanie gehört, gastierte in mehr als 80 Ländern weltweit und trat dabei u.a. in der Londoner Royal Albert Hall, im Pariser Olympia sowie in Moskau, St. Petersburg, Wien, Rom, Amsterdam, New York, Tokio, Kairo und Shanghai auf. 1990 waren die Sänger und Tänzer:innen im Rahmen der Oscarverleihung in Los Angeles zu erleben, 2015 folgte ein Auftritt zum 60-jährigen Bestehen der UNESCO im japanischen Nagoya. Das Ensemble hat mehr als 1000 georgische Volkslieder auf zahlreichen Tonträgern veröffentlicht, darunter eine 2015 erschienene Anthologie von 16 CDs.

The choir of the State Academic Ensemble “Rustavi,” which was founded by Anzor Erkomaishvili in 1968, consists of singers from different parts of Georgia, uniting various performance traditions. The ensemble, which also includes a dance company, has appeared in more than 80 countries